Burn for The Beloveds
by Sarah Rose Serena
Summary: It was inevitable. That she would wind up there, New Orleans, in the thick of war. Mikaelsons against the world, against their mother, their father too, brother to brother. It was inevitable she would be drawn back into the strife, because she was the catalyst all those centuries ago, and she's a catalyst now. Elena is Tatia. Tatia is Nik's. Always. Forever. [Sequel to "Tremble"]
1. Prologue

:::

_The world has turned and left me here_…

People died. She watched them go, heard their cries, tried to save some. She's upset about it. She's always upset about death. But, ironically, it was still a good night.

Covered in blood and feeling good, because even though the Corn Maze went predictably catastrophic halfway through the night, she saved some lives and nobody she loved had died, Elena kisses Liam and says goodnight. She kisses him because he's a cute dorky college guy, premed, and he just saved lives. With his hands. With his smarts. No supernatural involved. Kissed him because she felt like it. Because _impulse_. She heads into her dorm room for bed, smiling, thinking rare bright thoughts. Bonnie is still dead. Highly dysfunctional chunks of her life are apparently still missing from her memory. Her brother is still spiraling in his grief beyond the border of her hometown where she can't cross without dying a horrible death. Seems her life still revolves around it. Death. Dead. Dying. Die. She can't escape it. And yet…

And yet Elena is in a better mindset than she's been in years. She's actually feeling _good_. Maybe because she can't remember loving Damon anymore, has been able to find that old self she wanted back ever since before she died, before things went sour with Stefan. Whatever it is, she feels lighter lately, like a heavy burden's been lifted and finally she can breathe again for the first time in longer than she can remember. Can't pinpoint the why or how, and doesn't feel like picking it apart, so she just enjoys the moment.

Then the dreams come.

It's not unusual, a nightmare, not in her life. Might seem strange, now that she's a thing that goes bump in the night, but she's still afraid of the dark, afraid of everything it keeps secret that could turn and bite.

The dreams are where the recessive aspects of her linger strongest. History rich in blood and lies and monsters, back to the beginning of time. Tatia is in her head, always, always a presence on the sideline of her thoughts, her emotions, her memory. It's not an invasion so much as a fully integrated side of her psyche. Another soul, another life, a different way of doing things. Most days, she stays in the background, affecting Elena's feelings and behavior only in small subtle ways, things she doesn't mind. She still has control. She's still _Elena_. There's just more of her now. More than there was before she died. Not the first time, not the third, and how screwed up is her life that that's a qualifier? Beside the earlier incarnation of herself, there's also that bit of extra inhuman _something_ Tatia brought back with her from the Other Side when she bound herself to Elena and crossed over. Escaped from purgatory. That part, so much more than Tatia, Elena fights to keep buried. To put aside. To steadfastly _ignore_. Because it isn't either of them, not doppelgänger or werewolf or vampire, but something else, something new. An essence of something she can't possibly understand, something from the Beyond planes. And in her sleep, its hold is the most thorough. The most powerful.

Maybe this is because it's Halloween—_Samhainn_, Tatia thinks—or maybe it's just due to all the carnage she's seen tonight, after the college Corn Maze turned into a massacre, but she finds herself running. In her dreams, running for her life, running scared. Running through the dark, hearing him follow, feeling him draw close. She gets sucked in and she knows, just knows, that it isn't only a dream. It's another plane. A manipulation. A warning.

There is a door painted red in the distance. She's trying to reach it, stumbling in panic down a hall of dark shadows, banging at the red door as she crashes into it, trying desperately to get in, fear cloying in her throat as she cries for help, heart hammering at her ribcage. Hands snatch at her shoulders, her arms, rip her off the red door, wrench her around as a scream tears jaggedly out of the girl. But the sound dies in her throat, smothered by shock, faltered hard to discover _Elijah_. Elijah with his rough hands on her, gripping tightly to her so she can't get away, so she's trapped between his stone body and the impenetrable door. He's shirtless, blood-splattered, all slashes of white skin and red gore, looking … _vacant_.

He grabs onto her and jerks her into him, crushed against him, his touch growing harsher when she pushes back. Black eyes reddening, veins surfacing, expression still so empty, so _alien_ for the kind Elijah. He yanks her into him as she struggles, ducks his head, biting into her neck, making her cry out in pain, in surprise, confusion rippling like shockwaves through her system. Confusion, confusion. _This is Elijah_. What is he doing? Why is he hurting her? He's acting like a monster. Like a nightmare. He's draining her dry. She feels herself slipping away, feels herself dying in his arms, collapsing slowly, still trapped in his grasp, inch by inch falling to the floor beneath his body as teeth rip and rend, tearing her apart. Taking everything.

Elena wakes screaming. She comes awake all at once, with a violent jolt, swinging upright in bed as she yells into the quiet, all alone, in the dark, panting for breath.

"_Elijah_," she whispers roughly, fingers furling, grasping in the tangled covers as she gasps, knowing something is seriously wrong. Between disorienting flashes of running for the red door, she could've sworn she'd been in some sort of ancient mausoleum, older and more sprawling than the Salvatore crypt, a splintered image of the fearsome Original on his knees, hanging by his wrists on chains. Tormented. And it felt so real, so alarmingly real, that she doesn't need to think about it, doesn't need to wonder.

That inhumanness inside her connects her to the world in weird ways, slips consciousness through the ethereal planes when there is something pulling her, something tethering her to it. So the Elena part of her brain may want to go back to sleep, put it away into the box at the back of her mind where all her nightmares go, where everything she can't live alongside gets locked away from the light of day, but Elena isn't the only part of herself she carries these days, and the Tatia half won't let this go. She won't let her ignore it, because the Tatia half knows better than to let the girl cling to her denial and pretend. Not when it comes to those that _she_ loves. Elena's been living with her long enough to anticipate this, to know it straight off, so she knows better than to even _try_ getting back to her pillow.

Elijah is stoic at best, utterly unreachable at worst, but she knows him better than anyone. Elijah can be solemn, he can be cold, downright absolutely terrifying. But one thing he never is, will never be, is _empty_.

She's going to New Orleans.


	2. Part I

_Red door_…

Her first instinct is to jump in the car and hit the road, waste no time, but she realizes that'd take too long. And she knows herself well enough to know she'd never be able to bear being fixed behind the wheel for thirteen hours feeling this jittery. So she bypasses the freeway and heads to the nearest airport instead. Compels herself past the heavy security and into a private hangar, acquiring her own personal pet pilot with his own personal plane. Private jet, really. The perks of vampirism in action. Elena loves it, but Tatia doesn't think she'll ever get used to it. Wolves don't get compulsion. Neither do ghosts.

Because she makes him push it, not bothering with flight plans or control tower permission, they're touching down at Louis Armstrong Airport three hours later, and her pilot is going to be in big trouble. Which she'd feel bad about if she had the time to spare.

Roadtrip averted, Elena finds herself a taxi and heads for the French Quarter. She doesn't know where she's going or what's happening, and she didn't stop to pack blood bags, let alone a change of clothes, so she forces herself to slow down when she climbs out of the yellow taxicab on Canal Street. Slow down and find herself someone to eat. Then a little recon will be in order. She's not sure where to start, so after she snacks, she walks into the first bar she sees.

Normally, at this much of a loss, she'd call Bonnie for a little locator spell whammy magic, but Bonnie's dead, and that thought only stops her cold for a second or so.

Watching the patrons, listening to the hum of Halloween night, near morning, it doesn't take long at all to glean the first few bits of useful information. There's a war going on in the streets of NOLA. The wolves are with the witches, the vampires are decimated, and the Original family is in vengeful shambles. All she has to hear is _witches_. It's more than enough. And what better place to find a witch in New Orleans than one of the original cemeteries? She checks out three that are a bust before approaching the ominous wrought-iron gates of Lafayette Cemetery and knowing in an instant she's in the right place.

She can tell right away it's a hub of bad activity. She's seen enough sinister shit to recognize the vibe in the air. The charge. That creepy crawling skitter of spider legs shooting over her skin. Shivering up her spine. Making her vamp senses hiss. Elijah is here. _Darkness_ is here. Sickness. There are no witches in sight, but her nose and sharp night eyes lets her know plenty of wolves are wandering the tombstones.

At the gate, she waits, concealed by the sprawling shadowed oak that stands guard, slides out of her hiding spot and takes the man that strays from the irons on his own, no one else around. Advances in a blur, catches him by his throat, slams him back against the fence, ripping off his moonlight ring. Either he's become complacent with the ring, with the lack of vampires left in the Quarter these days, or he's just plain stupid, because there's no vervain in his system to stop her from sweeping up his mind in her compulsion. She just wrenches the ring from his finger, locks eyes, and says strongly, "Stop struggling. You don't want to fight me."

"I don't want to fight you."

"There's a man I'm looking for. An Original." Her grip on his neck loosens, his body slack, completely lax within the trap of her hypnosis. "Elijah Mikaelson."

"The witch has him strung up."

"In there?" He nods. "Good. Show me."

And she lets him go, steps back, watches him retread through the main gate into the maze. Follows the dense wolf right to Elijah.

* * *

><p><em>"<em>_Klaus?!" she calls out, shoving the front door open to the cavernous glitz of Mikaelson Manor. "Are you here? Hello? Dammit, Klaus!" She storms through the hollows of the mansion, impatience overshadowing the worry in her tone, irritation overwhelming curiosity. He'd left sixteen messages on her phone. Sixteen strange nonsensical messages, something about Silas, the white oak stake, sounding rather out of his mind. She couldn't really make sense of it all, but for the obvious takeaway, that he needed her back in Mystic Falls. And yet_…_ "Where the hell are you? Klaus."_

_"__Elena," he growls, rasping out, lilted English voice hoarse._

_She steps into the east parlor, stopping short when she sees him there, hanging off the stone hearth of the burning fireplace, his shirt gone, his sinewy body drenched in sweat and blood, claw marks dug horribly deep into his flesh, tissue under his fingernails. Looking raw, ragged, dragged over the coals of hell. She hesitates in surprise, eyes widening, blinking fast. "Jesus, Niko. Going a little rough on yourself these days, don't you think?"_

_Before she can finish the absent quip, he's blurred across the room, blood fingers wrapping her soft throat, pushing her into the wall behind her so hard the rich wood paneling cracks. She gasps under the chokehold, winces at the impact, her teeth rattling. Blue eyes flashing with the visceral animal, he grits out, "I will tear you apart. You don't use her."_

_"__Okay, sorry. Jeez, I slipped. No more Tatia. I swear."_

_"__Shut your mouth," he snaps, frustration whiplashing off him in palpable spurts._

_The anger in her rises like a neglected animal. Things haven't been the same between them since Kol. Since she lost her brother and shut out her humanity, they've only gotten stranger. Tenser. New territory for the two. They don't know where they stand and they're both still too pissed off to care to learn. But this… This is something else. Something's the matter with him and she doesn't have the Elena concern anymore enough to swallow this treatment._

_"__You wanted me here. Well, I'm here. You do realize I was in Pennsylvania with your sister on a rather important mission." She says this quick, coughing it out without breath, a frown in the crease of her brow, confused and unamused. "Funny side note, you'll be interested to hear what noble brother Elijah has been getting up to with Katherine."_

_"__Elijah," he echoes dazedly, not quite following her. Too wrapped up in whatever had him so worked over. "Elena?"_

_"__Uh, duh. Who else would it be? Nobody but me is stupid enough to take time out of their busy schedule to come check up on a homicidal Original who's obviously having some sort of mental breakdown." In his momentary distraction of self-doubt, she takes the opportunity to take the hand around her throat and break his wrist, planting a heel up into his stomach and kicking him off. He sails into the air, knocks hard onto his back, skidding along the hardwood towards the fire._

_Klaus rears upright onto his haunches, howling with rage, sweat slick and steeped in pitiful vengeful misery. "Silas," he manages to corral enough coherency to tell her, one hand going up to his temple in gesture, lips compressed. "Silas has been messing with my head."_

_"__Oh. Yeah, that makes more sense. For a minute there, I actually thought you'd cracked. But really, it was bound to happen. I'm shocked you've lasted this long."_

_"__Elena!" he grinds out, palms hitting the floorboards, down on all fours. Stripped bare of everything but desperation. "Slivers of the white oak stake are _…_ in me still. I feel them moving toward my heart. I can feel my blood boiling. Please. Just help me get them out."_

_Tipping her head to one side, the girl runs her tongue over her teeth in long consideration, walking forward step by step, Katherine's stolen pumps clicking on the dark polished wood as she approaches, a vicious apathetic lioness appraising her prey. "If I recall correctly, last time I needed you to help me with something, you so politely declined. In fact, I believe your exact words were something along the lines of: _go fuck yourself_."_

_Affronted, but still ragged, his back straightens. "I would never say that."_

_She grins, squints, says, "But it's what you meant, right?"_

_"__Elena—"_

_"__No, see, you were too busy screwing the new werewolf in town to get back at me. Too busy to bother with me when I came to _you_ for help, the only home I ever had still practically on fire, my brother's ashes not even cooled. You had no time for me, Niklaus. Remember?"_

_Gritted teeth, bone white fingers denting the hardwood, an animal growl thrums in him at her cool taunting, reverberating deep in his chest, in the back of his throat as he looks up at her with raw eyes. "You didn't need me. Your emotions were already off. What could I have done?"_

_"__Something," she says. Softly, thoughtfully, suggestively. A powerful blow in its quietness. But then she sighs, giving into the pleading in his eyes, into the monsterman who acts like king bowed down on his hands and knees before her. She lowers to him, knelt there, strokes a gentle hand through his mussed sandy hair, her cool fingertips ghosting across his feverish temple, her palm to his hot cheek, and the look he gets when she touches him, that look of blind hope, of tortured worship, like she's absolution. Like she's salvation. "Well," she whispers whimsically, feeling the power, feeling the thrill of cruelty and mercy. "Just because I like you bowing down to beg and pray…"_

_She doesn't think about the person she's become, the monster, having forsaken her soul and her heart and everything that drives her, everything that made her who she was, just to escape the pain of one last grief. One last devastation. She never thinks about that. Has a thousand better things to do with her days._

_Shutting his eyes under her caress, holding his face in both her hands now, cradling it, Klaus lets his rigid body relax infinitesimally. Breathes out, "Tatia."_

_"__Yes, Niko," she whispers sweetly, but it's a lie. A blade to his open wound she plans to maybe twist, if the impulse strikes her. Because ever since Jeremy, ever since turning it all off, Tatia is buried so damn deep, she'll probably never get out again._

_Inhaling through her nose, she closes her eyes and centers herself, bringing out that other space in her head, in her power, reopening them with the inhuman vision. The otherworldly way of seeing things. She drifts one hand to his shoulder and past, dipping down to the blade, finger wriggling into the messy wound he's dug into his own flesh, gnawing muscle and tendon to shreds. He stiffens again at the intrusion, hissing out a breath, but doesn't throw her off. After she roots around for an unnecessary second, she draws the hand back and slides those wet fingers into her mouth, captivating his gaze as she sucks his blood off. Bothering him with that twisting knife about as much as she arouses him._

_Harsh and rasping with richer things than just agony now, he barks, "Get it out."_

_"__I don't have to," she counters, hand leaving his cheek to bunch at his corded shoulder. Leaning in close, teasingly near, mockingly soft, lips centimeters apart, brushing side to side, hovering there. "You're infected." She tells him, "There is no sliver. There never was." She takes his face back in her hands, falsely pitying. "Babe, you've been infected by Silas's mind games." Mouth above his own, "There's nothing there."_

_And then she pulls away, shoving him down as she rises, spinning away with a lift of a heel as she leaves. Sashaying out of the room. It's perverse and pointless, and once she's back to her old self, she'll want to forget it all, but she likes feeling like Katherine. Empowered. Mean._

* * *

><p>Elena slips stealthily past the graveyard gates, trailing after the compelled wolf in shadow, keeping her distance. She bides her time when she finds the right crypt, waits perched in a low crouch atop a nearby mausoleum, watching the witch and her son, searching for an opening. Figuring out a little of what the hell is going on around here while she observes from the dark. And then wincing worriedly when her cell buzzes from her pocket. She digs it out quick to quiet the damned phone, light of the screen flickering across her face, making her sigh.<p>

It's Caroline.

With a wary glance down at the graveyard, she pulls back from the edge, lifts it to her ear, whispering distractedly, "I'm a little busy here, Care."

"Don't you dare hang up on me!" her friend snaps, sounding frazzled. "I am so _sick_ of people hanging up on me tonight."

"I'm sorry, Care, but I've gotta go."

"You don't understand!" she rushes on. "Damon's back! He's _alive_, Elena! Damon's alive. You've got to get back here. Like _right now_."

Elena goes still. Deathly still. Breath hitched in her chest, "Bonnie?" escapes her mouth before she can stop it, before she can prevent the spurt of blinding bright hope, only to have the girl on the other end of the line crush it a split second later.

"She's not with him. But she's not completely gone! Apparently she was with him in this sort of limbo plane, some kind of frozen day back in the nineties or something, so there's a chance we can get her back too."

A chance. Their chances never work out. A chance is … nothing. Disappointment. She lets it flit away before it can really settle heavy on her shoulders, not letting it become a tight pressure squeezing at her chest, an anvil on her stomach. She'll deal with that later, once she's back home and can dedicate herself to finding out the truth, dedicate herself to the cause of bringing Bonnie back now that they've got their first solid lead. Relief blooms in its place like a starburst there, relief for Stefan and his spiraling grief, joy that he has his beloved brother back, however much a psychotic ass. It takes a second to realize the implications to do with her. What they all told her, those photos, the strange fact that she evidently was so distressingly deep in love with Stefan's brother that she had to have Alaric compel away that love just to survive his loss.

She gets the feeling this was a significant point of contention between her and her other half, because there are people that Elena loves, and then there are people Tatia loves, and they don't always see eye to eye on the matter.

"That's great news, but I'm seriously in the middle of something, Caroline. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Back? Wait. Where are you?"

"Louisiana."

"_What_?! But, Elena—"

She shuts off the phone, shoves it back into her jeans pocket, and watches the witches leave. At fucking last. It's almost dawn. The mist sifting through the maze of ancient graves is swirling, thickening to dewy fog as the sky lightens from black to bruised blue, the moon fading away as the sun creeps closer. Her patience is waning so thin, it feels like a rubber band pulled taut and about to snap. She's got bad feelings galore.

Once they're far from sight, Elena huffs out a sharp breath and levers over the stone edge, landing silently on the crumbled cobbles outside the lit up crypt. Goes in and forces shaky steps forward when she finds Elijah trapped in some kind of mental prison, mental torture, like she experienced in her dream. Déjà vu makes her sway. Churns nausea through her gut as the girl pushes through it, through the wave of repellant magic trying to make her turn around and go, shoving herself obstinately past its thickness until she reaches Elijah.

Wasting precious seconds hesitating to touch his face, that sightless frozen way his dark eyes are open and dead scaring her off, turning her squeamish, she finally takes his jaw in her hands and lifts his limp head, calling his name. Starting soft, turning stern, shaking at him to wake up. She gives a few frustrated yanks at the chains binding his wrists, keeping him strung up like this, but they refuse to give way. And the harder she pulls, the higher the sparks fly as the candlelight flames sputter angrily at her interference. This entire tomb is a magical web of insidious prison. Her tormented fly, caught tight in its silk, awaiting the wicked spider's return. The limestone angel backlit behind his haunted image. Sacrilege.

"Elijah, please snap out of this. You need to hear me. You need to come back," she pressures. Pleads. Searching urgently around the crypt. At a loss.

Until she's not. Until she spots the hanging talisman twined from a ledge above him and her mouth twists into a grim smile. Hand falling to his unresponsive shoulder, she arches up onto her toes and gets her fingers on the doll, ignoring the sting, biting back her hiss. Breaking the spindled twine. Thrusting the sick voodoo doll into the nearest flame. Burning it in a burst of sparks and hissing angry heat. When she turns back to the chains, they splinter easily under her first supernaturally strong tug. He falls into her arms, careening forward against her body that dips low and slides close to catch him before he can spill to the ground.

"Elijah," she urges, hauling him up with her, stumbling across the crypt. "Come on, Elijah. Snap out of it. We need to get out of here before the bitch gets back."

Face falling into the crook of her neck, he murmurs thickly, "_Hayley_?"

"Delirious," she deadpans under her breath. "That's great." But then his hand is rising up and finding the curve of her throat on the other side, fingers twisting in strands of her wavy hair, thumb to her pulse point, breathing in shallow gulps of air against her skin. And she's having to stop and swallow. Having to recollect her urgency. Déjà vu back to a moment she was yanking a dagger from his chest, knelt over his desiccated body in the Salvatore boarding house basement, watching him come alive with a confused jerking abruptness. She got that same queasy feeling when he called her _Katerina_. "No, Elijah. It's Elena." Steadying her tone, she hauls him out into the graveyard aisle, veering left around a corner at the sound of footfalls in the distance. "Elijah, I've come to get you out of here. But you have to help me out, honey."

He's still not hearing her properly, she can tell, and he's still barely on his feet. A wolf comes out from behind a towering crypt and she shoves him back behind another, pushing both hands into his chest to get them out of sight in time, in a dizzying blur.

When he actually sees her face instead of someone else's, he's no more coherent than before. Exclaiming brokenly, "_Tatia_!" Shock widens his dark wounded eyes. "_Tatia_…"

She remembers the dream, remembers the emptiness in him when he grabbed hold of her, sank into her, rending flesh, _killing_. She thinks she understands the look, understands the way he's clinging to her, clutching her in his hands, catching pieces of curled chestnut tresses between his slick fingers, touching her jaw, closing harmlessly around her throat. Even though it's more Tatia in the driver's seat this second, at his look, at his touch, the way he holds her tight like she'll slip from his fingers, like he's done something awful, she says firmly, "_Elena_." Because that's what he needs to hear. "It's Elena."

And tugs him out of the haunted shadows of the cemetery, forcing him staggeringly into the crisp October night air. November, really, by now. Freedom is in sight, just over the last crest, when they get cut off right before the gate, a swarm of six nasty looking werewolves barricading their path. It's all wolf girl Tatia, echoes of ancient history, as she gives them a small animal grin, letting Elijah go, lifting her chin. She breathes in, stretching her lungs, shakes her limbs out. Cants her head and flashes a challenging look, one eyebrow winged, lips quirked. _Come and get me_, she all but spells out, and takes off in a blur, sweeping right past the lot of them, knowing without a doubt that they'll follow. There's no reason to care about her when they've got Elijah, but wolves are wolves, and she knows her people. They always chase.

It's laughably easy to lead them where she wants them, to divide them, picking the brutish men off one by one, two by two, and then there isn't anybody's ass left to kick. When she's done with them, she returns to find Elijah where she left him, hardly registering the world all around. Something … _missing_. In a way that tries to scare her, but she pushes it aside, reveling in the hot heady thrill of violence, of remembrance. She swipes the blood off her cheek and huffs out air. Pulls dazed Elijah away with a smothered sense of dread, of duty, pretending she isn't worried. Pretending she's saved him.

* * *

><p><em>The pleasant shock she feels when she turns and sees him sours into something ugly as she realizes why he's here. What this means. Katherine. Goddamn Katherine. He's been messing around with Katherine again. Like he hadn't learned his lesson the last time. The last dozen. The mere thought of it leaves an acrid taste on her supposedly emotionless tongue. But she puts on a shaky smile and does her best at playacting her despicable twin.<em>

_When he catches her arm, tugs her sharply back to him as she tries to walk away, she feels a stab of hesitation, of second guessing. And then he's taking her cheek in his hand and kissing her sweetly. Strongly. Like he knows what he wants. He's taking it. But then as soon as he pulls away from her, she can see it in his eyes, that he knows, even before he says her name. Says, "Elena," in that faintly chiding aristocratic tone, still somehow conveying the familiar warmth he's always associated with this incarnation._

_"__She's manipulating you, Elijah. Again."_

_"__Don't you think I've realized that?"_

_"__Then why let her?"_

_"__Something different is about you," he says, rather than answer, becoming distracted in his study of her, dark cool eyes narrowing in suspicion, in consideration. "It's more than just being a vampire now. You're not yourself."_

_"__Oh, see, I'm finally having fun," she quips, pulling free of his touch, spinning away. She is in no hurry to get far, enjoying twisting the knife, enjoying making him wriggle. And anyway, she wouldn't make it very far. She's his polite hostage, for Katherine's sake. Always Katherine. One day, she is going to take her time killing Katherine._

_"__You've abandoned your humanity," he surmises sadly at her back. Fingers skimming down the line of her spine. Catching at her elbow, he turns her to face him. Still studying. "Yes, but that isn't it completely. There's something else."_

_"__Your brother didn't tell you?" Her eyes light up, smile curving at the glee, giddy to be able to do what she's about to do to him. Flippant as ever, she says, "It's been awhile now. I'd have thought he'd mention that the first girl you ever loved was back from the dead, sharing a body with little old me."_

_Shock ripples through him so thick she can reach out and grab it, squeeze it dry between her fisting fingers, and her smile widens. Richens with the gauntlet emotion that runs his face. Disbelief, bewilderment, hope, disappointment, awe, suspicion, longing. Joy. Guarded love. "You can't be serious."_

_"__As a heart attack," she lilts, head tipped, brow rising. "Don't you recognize me?"_

_"__Tatia—"_

_"__Basically, yeah." Then, stepping into him, one hand smoothing delicately beneath his suit jacket across his sternum, fingers curving the shape of his side, sharing warmth. Tantalizing. Voice torturously soft, meanly appealing, she asks him, "How does it feel, Elijah, to know that while you've been letting your precious Katerina spin you up in her endless web of lies, the one you really wanted was right where you'd left her, losing everything she had left, thanks to precious Katerina? Does it hurt? Is it unfair? Do you believe me?"_

_Features hardening from the haunted look she put there, he catches her wrist in his hand, bruisingly harsh, stilling her caress. "How did this happen?"_

_"__Mikael," is all she plans to say. But then the emotion in his eyes draws more from her. "Your father killed me. While I was on the Other Side, Tatia came to me. She offered a deal. She'd made a pact with a greater power, something else, something that wanted to ride me back into the world and take Mikael with it back to hell. Tatia was the broker. She came with. The greater power got banished, but Tatia wasn't a rider by then. She was part of me. Still is. We're, like, one."_

_Her whole exposition reeks of irony, of taunting, rolling off her lips like poison. Like desire. His fingers flex impulsively around the bone of her wrist, nearly fracturing, but as clouded as he is, as cruel as she turns him, he has enough mind regardless to release her with a jolt the second she flinches, reeling backward from her as if she's the devil himself. As if she's the sun. "Why didn't you tell me? The night I protected you from Rebekah. We spent hours together. Could you have not said a word? Why work with my mother against us? Why betray me? Tatia would never have—"_

_"__It's not _just_ Tatia in here," she snaps, suddenly sharp, vicious, intense. Fiery and bitter. "And yes, it was a conflicted decision. I gave myself hell for it." Quelling, she smoothes down the skirt of her red flower dress, tugs the lapels of her cropped leather jacket, brushes chestnut and crimson hair off her shoulder. "I was trying to get free."_

_"__Free of what? My brother?"_

_"__All of you."_

_"__I see."_

_"__And her," she adds, leaning sideways against the white stone of the narrow tunnel arch they've found haven within. "I was trying to fight fate, I suppose. Fight who I'd become."_

_"__And who have you become, Elena?"_

_"__Now?" she counters, eyebrow winging, expression flat. "Now, I'm nothing."_

* * *

><p>It isn't possession by a ghost or split personality. They've literally merged existences. All but melded souls. They still think of it in terms of Elena and Tatia, separate entities coming at life from divided sides, however much a team they are. But that is only because the truth of it is so hard to grasp, so impossible to explain, even to themselves. Themself. See? It's complicated. Way past the time they tried struggling for supremacy, struggling to ignore each other, they have accepted their symbiosis. Her symbiosis. It's just one her now really, just TatiaElena, one girl. But that's too messy, too foreign, so the brain deciphers it in a way that's more familiar to it. Categorizes and differentiates the varying facets of its single cohesive core psyche in the only way it's capable of.<p>

It's one girl, woman, one person, a vampire who had been a werewolf in another life, a dead woman come back to life more times than she could count, alive with a little extra punch of Other Side power she doesn't pretend to understand. Same person, but there is the Elena side of things, with her memories and traits and quirks and baggage, and then the Tatia end of things, with all the same, and then there is everything in between that belongs to or at least touches both halves of the same whole. It's tricky, confusing, headache inducing for sure. So, to simplify matters, she's become accustomed to terming it as the driver's seat. Or passenger. It's a simple succinct way to think of things, of how it works in her head, and in this moment, it's definitely Tatia in the driver's seat, the more dominant half in Elijah's presence tonight.

She lugs him uncomfortably up the stairs to the second floor, his arm hooked around her shoulders and his weight bearing heavily down on her, sliding sporadically between coherent and delirium. Fumbling with the key, she pops the lock on room 13 at the cheap roach motel and staggers with him over the threshold into the moldy dark. The sun has touched the clouds and turned the bruises orange. She could've compelled her way into a nicer hotel, but this was the first one she passed by, so she didn't bother. Kicking the door shut behind them, she dumps him unceremoniously on the California king bed and draws the drapes closed, just in case someone is watching from the street. She doesn't think anyone followed them, but she can't be a hundred percent sure of anything.

When he refuses her wrist, her neck, again and again, refuses to drink from her, she heaves an exasperated sigh and trudges back out to find him a human. She nabs a boy off the street, first one she finds, and brings him up to the weakened Original, compelled into compliance. Shoving the guy down onto the edge of the bed, she draws the vamp out of her, uses her fangs to open his throat, pushing his head down toward Elijah as the blood begins to swell, spilling forth. But he still seems averse, so she climbs over him, dropping down on his other side, raking soft fingers through his matted dark hair, murmuring instinctive reassurances. Coaxing.

"You need to eat. You'll feel more like yourself after you do."

She's never seen him like this and she can't say she's enjoying it. In fact, it has her freaked the hell out. Deeply philosophically unsettled.

In the quiet moments, after he's drank his full and she's sent the boy away, keeping him from taking too much, even when he starts to resist her gentle intervention, her fingers keep sifting absently through his hair, caressing his temple, damp with sweat and blood. Feverish. Speaking softly as he regains himself, bit by bit, coming to his senses. Wondering worriedly, "What did she show you?"

He catches her wrist in a quicksilver motion, freezing the comforting movement, dark eyes snapping open, clear and aware. Cutting. "The truth," he tells her, voice cold. Hard. Stone. Broken beneath it. "I'm just as much a monster as Niklaus." Looking _into_ her. Looking at Tatia, not Elena. "Worse. I feign to be better."

"Don't say that."

"I murdered her." Gaze sharpening as she blinks, he amends, "I murdered you."

Neutrally, she retorts, "Says who?"

His fingers tighten reflexively around her wrist. Expression pained as he admits, "I saw it."

"How do you know what you saw was real?" she asks lightly, quizzically, her own fingers furling in his hair, her palm to the side of his face, resting soothingly. Like faith.

"I _feel_ it."

"Elijah," she tries to argue, to protest, but finds her voice dying before she can find the right way to address this. Instead, she ends up sighing, looking off, asking, "Where's your brother?"

"I do not know." He glances for the first time at his surroundings. "Why is it you did not take me home?"

"Home where?" she answers evenly, and his head sets back down to the pillow.

She goes out again, comes back with a coffeehouse cup of steaming tea, sitting down on the edge of the bed, her hip against his side, offering it tentatively to the still shaken man. Still weak. Unsteady. She gives it awhile, silence a live stifling creature around them, laden with all the very many things that lie unspoken between them, issues unvoiced, truths unconfessed. Finally, she knows she needs to go, needs to resume that forward momentum that's keeping her sane, before she does something stupid. Something more stupid than coming to New Orleans.

"You rest. I'll be back." But she knew he wouldn't go for that, which is why she wasted time breaking into a witch's shop on Bourbon Street, drugged his tea with something strong enough to get around his Original metabolism, why she took so long brewing tea. He tries to sit up and follow when she makes to leave but can't manage it. She lays a hand to his chest, settling him gently back down. "Rest, Elijah."

"Elena—"

"_Rest_." Then, lips to his cheek, she softly commands, "Don't think about the red door."


	3. Part II

_The things we reap_…

By the time she finds Niklaus, he's a corpse on the cement floor of a dilapidated warehouse. Grayed skin, varicose veins, body eerily lifeless. White oak stake sticking out of his chest. It stops her in shock. In horror. The sight of him there, lying like that, because no matter how many times she's tried to kill him, seen him supposedly bested, that sick punch to the gut, that sudden gaping hollow carved out of her chest, it never gets easier. Each time it happens, she thinks, _My God, it's happened. He's finally gone._ She thinks, _I've lost him. I've lost him forever. I'm never getting him back._ And it's so her own thought, her own sick devastating experience, that it takes an odd moment to realize that it's not right, not her feeling, that it's Tatia, and that Elena should be over the moon, however counterintuitive it's become.

But he's not burning. She's seen the white oak stake in action. They burn up as soon as it touches the heart. And _he's not burning_. He looks like he's been daggered. Like he's…

The witches. They must be doing something to hold it off. Teenagers, boy and girl, clasping hands, eyes shut, chanting fervently, brewing up a magic breeze as nature roils in response. Mikael has caught on, is coming for them, and as the boy tries to stand in his way as she chants, he gets knocked across the pavilion. Inside the warehouse, a woman with blonde hair and a wide face is knelt over him, struggling to wrench the stake out of Klaus's chest when Elena arrives. _Cami_, Mikael had called her. She's human, weak, can't dislodge the weapon from his breastplate by herself. The little witch is screaming, Mikael ripping into her throat, disrupting the spell. She's not going to get it out in time.

All of this takes a heartbeat for Elena to absorb, coming on the scene in a rush, eyes darting over the entire situation, assessing the players. In the next heartbeat, she's blurring up beside the woman, crouched at his body. Her fingers alight around Cami's wrist and the blonde's head whips around in panic, only for her brow to furrow in confusion, finding Elena instead of what she had expected.

Giving a swift jerk, Elena quips, "Need a hand?"

The stake slides out. Color begins seeping into Niklaus's body.

"Who are you?"

"I'm the doppelgänger," she retorts, absently, distractedly, flipping the stake from Cami's fingers into her own skilled grip, laying a hand lightly to the woman's shoulder in reassurance as she rises. "You should go."

"I'm not leaving him."

Elena smiles, but she's already turning towards the magic fracas. Towards where Mikael has thrown the little witch aside and swiveled around. He stops when he sees her, shock rippling like a tangible effect. It's all Tatia then, the second she meets his gaze, millennia old anger igniting in the dark grin she twists, spreading her feet. The protective rage. The personal hurt. This man is her most despised burden. Her original enemy. For what he's done to his children that she loves, for what he's done to her, for setting centuries of misery and death in motion because of his hate and his pride. _This man took her daughter away from her. Took her life._

"_You_," he snarls.

Cocking her head, expression humorless, hungry, thinning her lips. "How many times do I have to kill you, vampire?"

That's all Tatia and he knows it. He lunges.

Cami tries to help but gets slapped, spun away to hit the brick wall hard. Which is when Marcel slides into the fight, catching Mikael's fist before it can connect with Elena's stomach a second time, thrusting his knee up into Mikael's gut to knock him back, getting his hand from around her throat. Elena doesn't recognize the handsome black man who's come to her rescue, but Tatia does. She spent decades watching his presence shape Niklaus and Elijah and Rebekah for the better last century, and then watched it tear them apart. She was there, watching over her loved ones as she often did from the shadow of purgatory, was there when Niko first decided to step in and save a poor slave boy. Took him into the family, seeing himself in the child. For that, he feels familiar to her, feels proprietary, while to Elena he's a stranger.

Klaus's protégé batters the Original back with a fierce flurry of smooth moves. Right cross, left hook, sharp knee, spinning kick, front kick, uppercut jab, dirty haymaker, and Elena comes at him from the side, almost matching his speed, his skill, cornering Mikael, pushing him back. They almost have him. Marcel pins him to a stack of debris, Elena helping hold him restrained with her free hand to his shoulder, raising back the white oak stake, driving it down to his heart, where he lets go of Marcel and bars her arm. Together, they fight to push through his strength, tip of the stake digging into his flesh. They almost have him. But then Klaus comes alive with a rough gasp and Tatia has to turn her head, has to look back, a cheap stupid mistake, a fatal flaw. Mikael backhands her, momentum sending her flying, crashing through a rusted metal support, the beam ripping free so half the roof collapses on top of her, burying Elena in the rubble.

The Destroyer bucks Marcel off as chunks of cement and steel rain down over her, cloud of dust exploding. He catches Marcel's next roundhouse, snatching his calf, sweeping his lone leg out from under him so that the black man hits the ground hard on his back at the raging monster's feet. Breaking off a shaft of wood, motions blurring, he hammers it down overhanded towards the vampire's chest. He'd be dead if a chain didn't wrap Mikael's neck from behind just a second before the makeshift stake can get at Marcel's heart, ripping him backward.

Hayley emerges, rounding to his front, smacking him down with a cement block at the end of the chain. Marcel surges onto his feet at her side, backing her up, Klaus reclaims his strength, rising fast and furious, and they come together, brothers in arms, Klaus, Marcel, Hayley, Cami, and the little witch, closing ranks. Facing off.

Knowing when the odds aren't in his favor, Mikael opts for tactical retreat. "Come find me, when you don't have fools, women, and children fighting your battle for you. _Son_." He blurs into an escape, quicksilver and cowardly behind the veil of a hateful brute. He doesn't expect Elena to be in his way, having fought her way painstakingly from the ruins, barely on her feet but vicious as hell.

Woman scorned, fierce and brutal, burning hotly, she shoves through the pain, the hard weight, suddenly stopping him, jerking him out of his blurring streak as her body appears in his path and her fist punches into his chest, using his own momentum against him, letting him ram it. Squeezing harshly, she makes him gasp, makes his knees buckle, dropping down onto them before her, keeping her vice tight on the throbbing organ. "No more stalling," she says raggedly, breathily, intensely. Reaches up with her free hand and grabs onto the torn piece of rusted rebar stuck in her shoulder joint, grits her teeth, wrenches it out with a stifled cry, driving it deep and underhanded through the front of his throat. _Vindictive_. Ripping out his heart a second after the rebar slams in. Her fingers slacken, sticky vibrating heart slipping from her, thumping wetly into the dust. She releases the metal and lifts one foot, planting it to his ravaged chest, shoving him over onto his back.

He goes limply, lifelessly, all but destroyed.

Plastered in layers of dirt and dust, caked in blood and hunched, rasping for air, she looks down at the macabre sight and says, "This time, I want you to _stay dead_."

Being an Original, of course he needs the white oak still, but it's good enough. Someone else can finish him off, because she's about to drop.

And in the ensuing silence, palpable, deafening, someone shatters the lull with, "_Elena_."

The quiet reverberating shock in Klaus's voice as he breathes her name from across the room makes her laborious breathing hitch. Makes her heartbeat stutter, throat tightening, her bruised broken body going stiff with tension. Anticipation. Dread. Fear. Because when he's saying _Elena_ like that, he's really saying _Tatia_.

All that lies between that name and their bodies, it's a charged thing.

The secret is a strict one. Not even Caroline knows. And Klaus, he's kept it, for whatever his own reasons are, all this time. Beyond all that they've been through. Only Elijah knows the truth between them, knows that Tatia has come back, embodied the last of the Petrova line.

The last doppelgänger.

* * *

><p><em>The knife cuts into her neck. She feels the sting of it, feels the fine trickle of blood seeping down the soft length of her throat, and every fiber of her being is screaming at her to stop it. Contrary to popular belief, she doesn't actually have a death wish. She does have a penchant for strong self-preservation. Just because she won't throw somebody she cares about under a bus to keep herself safe doesn't mean she won't fight for her own life.<em>

_But this is _Klaus_. This is a man who's a monster with Alaric's face about to kill Niklaus. However tumultuous and complicated and fraught their relationship is right now, it's Niko, and the Tatia in her just can't let that happen. This time, Elena is right there with her, because if Klaus dies, every vampire in his bloodline dies. Her friends, her boyfriend, everybody she loves will go with him. She'll lose everyone in one fell swoop. So yeah, she ignores the crushing repulsion of her body fighting her on this and starts to slit her own throat. She will. She'll do it. She's terrified and panicked and desperate. She'll fucking do it._

_"__You know you need me, Alaric. Doppelgänger blood created you. It can end you. If I die, you die too. So put the stake down and— Let. Him. Go."_

_"__You're not crazy enough for that," he challenges, trying to call her bluff. But she's not bluffing, not even a little. So the scalpel from the science lab digs in, drags across, and Alaric goes white. Yelling, "No! No, no. Stop! Stop!"_

_Klaus takes the second of distraction to get off his back, flipping their grips, snapping Ric's wrist in half. He doesn't risk going for the white oak stake as it skitters across the linoleum, just knocks the supercharged vampire hunter into the lockers and surges into a blurring streak of escape. Her human eyes can't follow that fast, can't register what happens when they react, but she feels the burst of wind at his movement. She feels a body collide with hers, arm locking around her, corralling her off her feet into the side of a strong lean frame. The bloodied scalpel drops with a clatter and Klaus sweeps away with her as quick as he can push himself._

_All she can do is screw her eyes shut, cling to him, and pray._

_Maybe she hits her head, maybe she cut too deep and bled out, but she can't remember passing out. Just knows that she must've. Just knows that there's black and then she's coming groggily aware. Tied to a chair._

_"__What?!" is the first thing out of her mouth, confused, fatigued. Betrayed, pissed, hurt. Fingers fumbling clumsily, tugging at the tubes attached to her, the straps buckled around her forearms to keep them still. Sense comes in pieces, delayed for a minute, but eventually she gets it and calms. There's a needle in her arm, donor bags hooked to the back of the chair, filling up with red. Her lashes flutter, breath sucking in sharp, head lolling aside, eyes rising to find Klaus leant in the doorway, arms folded, expression dark. Watching her. Hurt strengthens into anger and she mutters weakly, "Son of a bitch."_

_"__Take it easy, love."_

_She's all ready to put up a fight, to tear him apart, but when she goes to rip out the needle, his hand lands on her knuckles, a warm soft touch stilling hers. She looks up, glaring fiercely, mutinously, righteous fire flaring up, but he is quick to unbind her. Surprising her. Softening her. Relieved as the straps come off, she relaxes._

_"__Just borrowing a bit of blood. I'll need insulation if I'm to keep our new Original at bay." Leaning over her still, his smile shows teeth. Is a myriad of conflicting sentiments. "Can't very well kill him with the two of you so intrinsically linked, now, can I?"_

_Mildly rueful about assuming the worst, she wriggles in the chair, too tired to push out. "What are you going to do?"_

_He reads the cue and takes her in his hands, helps her up from her seat, taking over with a stronger steadier touch from where she's rubbing her bruised wrists, kneading the sore flesh. "I'm going to do what I said I'd do for you a year ago." Thumb stroking across her cheekbone, he tells Elena, "I'm going to leave you behind."_

_"__Klaus—"_

_"__This town was getting dull anyway, love." He talks over her, heading off anything she wouldn't really want to say, a careless shrug of his shoulders conveying his feigned disinterest. "I'll go, and Alaric will follow, and you will be safe."_

_"__But—"_

_"__I won't kill him. Not until I find a way to unlink you," he promises, voice quieter than it should be, more earnest than he intended. His hand turns, knuckles resting on her cheek as he studies her face, looking into her eyes, looking _into_ her. Reacting innately to the imploring way she stares up at him, lips fallen apart, words lost on indecisiveness. Loud in the silence with all the things she can't say, still too much Elena, too much of a mess. When his knuckles turn again and his touch falls below her jaw, palm pressing to the cut in her throat, she sucks in a breath, smothers a shudder. He could've kissed her, in that moment, if he'd wanted, but instead he bit into his wrist and offered her the bleeding wound._

_The moment breaks when Stefan, Damon, and Tyler rush in, a surging swarm of blurring fast aggression, blitzing them. As if an Elena/Klaus/Alaric showdown hadn't been more than enough for one afternoon. Knocking her away from Klaus, pinning him back between the three of them, out for revenge. Out to save her. Elena hits her head on the way down with a crash, skull bouncing off the wooden step of the archway, crying out a groggy, "No!" as Stefan's hand pierces the hybrid's chest._

_Thanks to Bonnie's magic, to Stefan's grudge and Damon's possessiveness, Klaus desiccates within seconds. Before she can stop them. Before she can even figure out what the hell they're doing to him. Damon lets go once he can't fight, bending and reaching for her, helping her up. Holding her back._

_"__No, wait. Stop. Guys, listen to me. Stefan, you don't have to do this. You don't understand!" Her words go ignored, her protest sliding right through them, Damon's grip growing more restraining than supportive the more she struggles._

_She can't stop them. She can't help him. Her halves are splitting, warring with herself, expending so much of the dregs of energy she has left on the internal fight. Tatia is willing to do things Elena won't. For Niko, to protect him, she'd have ripped these men to shreds if Elena didn't stop her. Too busy struggling to keep Damon safe from her Tatia desires, to keep herself from hurting Stefan, from killing him, because half of her is horrified at that thought, she can't do anything to help Klaus. So she watches … as the life drains away from him._

* * *

><p>After the warehouse, they scatter.<p>

The witches disappear. Marcel corrals Cami to take home after a sober nod of gratitude from Klaus and an acknowledging nod back, pausing for a moment to look the haggard Elena up and down with an appreciative, "Nice working with you, gypsy girl." Which makes her smile despite her battered state. A sly irony, she thinks, his outdated epithet, the way he says it, how he can't possibly know just how on the nose he is.

Hayley is the next to take off, muttering something about Elijah, an inquisitive glance thrown back at them over her shoulder, wondering what Elena Gilbert is doing here, wondering what one has to do with the other.

Klaus doesn't say a word to her. Just slips an arm across the small of her back, fingers furled into her side, keeping her up when her knees would've failed her. They walk out into the sun. Hobble, really. She's too badly injured, too many broken bones, too much blood lost, and she hasn't eaten enough in the last few days, so she's healing too slowly. She needs to feed.

They don't talk on the ride back to the city. She's too uncomfortable to cave to the tension, too tired to be awkward, wishing she'd stayed in bed. Elena has no business being in this city. With him. It'll mess things up. It always does. Whenever they get close, get embroiled, it always makes everything messy. Complicated. Confusing. When he's not in her life, when Elijah's gone, she can be more Elena than Tatia. Tatia can be background hums. But then those inextricable parts of her original life come into focus and Tatia is irrepressible. She very nearly overwhelms. Elena doesn't like that. Elena's a little bit afraid of that.

Out on the street of the Quarter, he slings an arm about the shoulders of the nearest human all by his lonesome, compels him quiet when he tries to argue, bringing him to her where she rests propped against the brick behind a gingerbread corner hotel. The overhung canopy of the balcony rows providing shade, providing cover, she lets her hunger loose, eyes reddening with the bloodlust, fangs descending. She reaches out, fingers bunching in the fabric of his jacket, tugging him close, sinking into his throat with her teeth. Her tongue laves against rough skin, drinking deep. Filling up. Taking more than she normally would. And when he starts to collapse, she puts her arms around him, holding him to her, taking more. She feels the need begin to sate, feels the remaining abrasions in her skin knit together into smooth flawlessness, feels her bones begin mending to rights, her energy returning. A parasite, a succubus, a monster. Elena doesn't mind it that much, her existence, not since this is what she's become and there's nothing to do, but Tatia always did disdain vampires. Funny then that the only two men she ever loved are exactly that. But they were never their curse to her. They were only _them_. It's Tatia, not Elena, who stops her from draining him dry, pulling back with a long draw, head falling on the brick behind her as she lets him go and the man slumps to the pavement, licking at her bloody lips, demonic red in her eyes receding.

"Feeling better, love?" is all he asks, the first thing he's said to her since _Elena_. There's an undercurrent she can't quite decipher in the unusual tightness of his casual tone.

Opening her drowsing eyes, savoring the afterglow of a good meal, she watches him pick her victim up and dust him off, locking gazes, compelling away his memory of meeting them. He even smears a touch of his own blood over the wound to seal it up, leaving the man with just enough strength to stumble out and down the block. It's not so much surprising, but puzzling, and she watches him until he turns to look at her, absorbs her expectant expression.

Reacts to it.

Striking suddenly, startlingly, his polite patient mask dropping, sharp jade eyes flashing gold and black, lush red lips pulling from his teeth. He grasps her by the back of the neck, jerking her into him, crushing her to his body as he catches her shoulder, wolf fangs ripping through her, swallowing her down. She yelps in surprise, in wariness, pushing at him pointlessly. He slides an arm around her, curving along her back, around her hips, pinning her taut. She gets worried by the rage vibrating inside him, by the tightly coiled deadliness he'd been hiding beneath a calm, her survival instincts kicking in after a minute, when he only takes more, only tightens his hold. She drives a knee into his thigh, a low jab at his liver, fingers prying at his jaw, trying to force him to disengage, to back off. All it does is rouse a warning growl from the bottom of his chest, reverberating through them both as she struggles and he jerks her. She kicks his shin and arches away and gasps for breath when he moves quicksilver again, slamming brutally into the brick with her, vicing her between his body and the building.

Finally, finally, he lets go. Elena sinks unevenly to the ground, hitting her backside with an aggrieved noise, frowning up at his dark smoldering gaze. She's clutching her torn shoulder, tangled hair getting in the way, matting with blood, her skin all around it burning awfully as the wolf venom spreads through her bloodstream.

"You prick," she gasps.

Klaus just smiles. Swipes a thumb across his chin, collecting the lines of her blood that have spilt past his lips. His eyes meld back to blue, but green in the dark, and he cants his head at her, appraising the girl. "You killed yourself. Don't think I didn't hear about that. I've still got spies in Mystic Falls."

"I came back! I knew I would."

"_You killed yourself_," he repeats, as if she's dense. "You didn't know if you would return. Purgatory was collapsing and you decided to blow yourself up."

"To save _Stefan_," she bites out, eyes narrowed angrily. "To save _everyone_. And that was months ago."

"I don't care. If you want to die, it's going to be my poison running through your veins when you do. If you want to die, I will accommodate."

It's not serious. It's a threat, a reprimand, a curse. He's furious with her, and the brighter his eyes are glimmering looking down at her, the sharper the knife he wields becomes. So she grits her teeth and grounds out, "I get it. Okay? I'm sorry I didn't call for help. Next time the world's about to end, I'll come find you."

"We had a deal, Elena."

Less edged than her last apology, she says softly, "I know. I'm sorry."

She's looking down now, grimacing at the burn of his venom coursing in her, working fast. Faster than a normal werewolf's bite. She sees his shoes shift, his knees bend, crouching before her with a long-suffering sigh, his eyes rolling boyishly as he offers her his wrist. Her fingertips press coolly at the warm proffered flesh and tendon, pulling it closer, extending the arm to her. She licks her lips, parts them, poised to sink into him, but then she hesitates. Thinks better of it. Draws back. With a spiteful look, her attitude arch, she catches him at the nape and yanks him, piercing the vulnerable curve of his pulse point, sucking sharply. Deeply. His hand smacks back against the brick behind her head, the impact of his palm denting the wall, shaking foundation, sprinkling unsettled cinder down into her hair, his strong fingers furling partially there.

Before she died, that third time, in this life, before she transitioned, he had the excuse of needing her blood. When she was human, or close to it, he could say, _"I need your blood to make my hybrids. You're my top priority. Don't do anything stupid."_ It didn't have to be about messy confusing possible feelings, possible futures, or maybe just the empty echo of dead love, a very long time ago emotion. It could be straightforward, simple, pure ruthless ambition, nothing but. Sure, they both knew they were just hiding behind that, but it gave them something to hold onto. A buffer between them, something to ease the intensity, to muffle its dangerous ferociousness. Because that pressure, that overpowering potential of everything they struggled to keep buried, it was a frightening sensation. Neither of them wanted to drown in it. But she's a vampire now. She's a vampire and her blood is just about useless, at least for what he needs, so there's nothing to hide behind anymore. There's no easy out. When he was trying to find the cure for her, when they were dealing with Silas, it was different. There was reason. But then everything went to hell. And he went away. _Ran away_. And she finally had her life back. Could be mostly just Elena, until something reminded her of Klaus, or Elijah, or Rebekah, or werewolves and daughters. Finally, she was free, feeling good. Like a fresh start. And now she's here, with him, and there's no protection left for either of them. There's no pretense.

There is only the clear penetrating fact that he needs to know she's in the world somewhere, needs to know he can find her when he wants to, when it's time. _When he's ready_.

And the uncomfortable undeniable truth that she needs the same.


	4. Part III

_There is a house in New Orleans_…

"A baby?" she exclaims, warm and buzzed, fuzzy from the hard liquor and the candlelight as they're catching up. Drinking in the night across the table from each other. Laughingly relaxed. "A _baby_. Seriously, Niklaus, that's … that's incredible."

The hybrid is slouched low in his seat, lazily regal, folded ankles stretched out beneath the rich oak table and one arm hooked on the corner spoke of his hardback dining chair. He's at the head of the table, Elena leant forward on one side closest to him, her back to the wall, her front to the open atrium of the compound, its high arched architecture and running fountain at the core of its court. She has her elbows on the tabletop, head tipped, eyes alight in the warm glow, but he's looking down at his glass, swirling the amber contents with a brooding thoughtfulness she recognizes as his avoidance of emotion. Of pain. "She's gone. With Rebekah."

"In hiding. Because of Esther?" she guesses, growing solemn.

"Essentially."

So she perks up, saying simply, "Then we should get rid of her, no? There is no Other Side. No purgatory for her to hide in anymore. Once she's gone, she'll be gone. She won't be able to touch this world ever again."

"If only it were such an uneventful task, getting rid of my mother."

Feeling refreshingly light, she presses her ribcage against the edge of the table and shoves his shoulder. Admonishes, "You should've kept me updated. I could've helped."

He seems faintly startled by the girl's new unreserved habits, distractedly retorting, "You? You were supposed to be living your life, _finding yourself_, making that decision."

"Decision?"

"Tatia or Elena," he answers flatly, quickly, drawing her back. "Who it will be." After a beat of charged quiet, still swirling the Scotch in his tumbler, watching it flicker in reflective shadows from the candlelit illumination, he presses, "So what's the verdict, love?"

"It's a tossup," she says with a wistful sigh and a wry smile, falling back against her chair as he looks up at her, blue eyes finding her face with a familiar complexity. Familiar contradiction. Her fingers curl around the ends of the glossy wooden armrests. "No decision."

"If you recall, I said I'd wait for you."

"And then you blew back into town and decided to distract yourself with Caroline."

Klaus smiles, the first genuine twist of wet red lips tonight. "Blame your boyfriend, darling. If he hadn't stolen my family's coffins to hold hostage, I wouldn't have broken my word to you and returned."

Because he's right, and because she doesn't want to rehash old conflicts, Elena just exhales, shakes her head, hazel eyes glimmering with indulgence. Acceptance. It still twinges, that period of time between them all, between her and Stefan especially. The estrangement that went on was technically his own doing, his own self-destructive preoccupation with his vendetta, but she had to admit, if just to herself, that she unintentionally pushed him away and that's what led to it all. Pushed him away because of Klaus, because of Tatia, because she didn't know how to be Elena and Tatia together, as one person, and assimilate that with all its consequences, primarily the sudden drastic shift in her feelings for Klaus, into the Elena she'd been before. Stefan may have been freed of his burden by her Other Side powers, his ripper tendencies and the guilt and grief that had built because of it for almost two centuries, but he had fresh wounds to deal with then, from Klaus's compulsion torments, from Elena's own troubles, and he wanted payback. She had never blamed him for that, could understand, could empathize, but it still hurt.

And it complicated already convoluted things to a ludicrous degree.

"Was it just to vex me?" she wonders, all but idly, not wanting to dwell on the darker topic. "Your infatuation with Caroline?"

"At first. Only at first."

"You do have a type," she murmurs, bringing her own glass to her lips, hiding her smile with a long slow sip. "Two types, apparently, and they're polar opposite. I guess that suits you."

"I can't disagree," is all he drawls.

"She's doing well, by the way. I think her out of everyone took Bonnie's death in stride. Losing Bonnie and losing home, since none of us can get into Mystic Falls anymore, thanks to that stupid gypsy spell." She pauses, considers herself for half a second before casually sharing, "I think she's in love with Stefan."

"Is that what you think?" he mocks. "Best friend in love with your soulmate. How daunting."

"Stefan's not my soulmate, Nik." Letting go of the chair, she leans forward again, resting her forearms on the table, folded together, slowly licking her lips. "He was a good first love, who I still love, but he's not my soulmate." And then, "What about you? He was your best friend once, wasn't he? How do you feel about him with the girl you love?" she challenges.

Matching the soft teasing of her countenance, eyebrows rising, he counters, "The girl I love?"

"Oh, don't tell me she's not. After all that chasing you did!"

Mildly, he warns, "You're approaching a very precarious precipice, Elena, dear."

"Come on, Klaus. We're having an honest conversation. You know what those are?"

"_Elena_," he purrs, accent doing funny things to her name, to her nerves.

But her tone gets persistent, sobering enough to make him give in. "Tell me the truth, Niko. How do you feel?"

"I feel like I have bigger things to concern myself with than a nineteen-year-old's love life," he snaps impatiently, and then downs the remnants of his glass before setting it down hard and sending it sliding across the smooth polished tabletop.

The girl's hand whips out, catching the tumbler as it whizzes by, saving it from a shattering on the floor at the other end. She looks across at him with a level stare, with a smile, saying soft and sincere, "Of course you do. But you _feel_ something. Don't you?"

With a sigh of frustration, he turns his head, rolls his eyes skyward in put-upon resignation, telling her at last, "I care for Caroline. But to be blunt, most of what had interested us turned out to be unresolved sexual tension."

Unsurprised, still smiling, she prompts, "And?"

He grins. Leans forward to mimic her posture, bringing them closer, his lilted tone wicked. "And it's been resolved. Quite spectacularly, in fact."

"_Nik_," she drags out chastisingly, but then changes tact, "Don't think I didn't know that."

"Then why did you ask?"

"I wanted you to tell me."

"It never seemed to bother you," he comments.

To which her own grin blooms for. "And that irritated you something fierce."

"It did not."

"It did so."

"Not everything is about you, doppelgänger."

"I know it," she argues. Chides him, "That's not nice. Rubbing that in. You can't diminish me by reminding me that I'm a copy of someone else. It isn't true."

Archly, he presses, "But it is, isn't it? You're a shadow."

"And the werewolf?" she counters, a mild teasing lilt to her rasping tone, pushing onward, even though he obviously isn't interested in the direction of this shockingly civil conversation. "Another werewolf, Nik. I thought you'd sworn off."

Klaus smirks. "So did I. Hayley was a bit of a surprise."

"Still is surprising, from what I can tell," she quips, lifting her own glass to her lips again with a soft warm laugh. "For the mother of your child, she's a good choice."

Which startles a strong laugh out of him, a husky abrupt bark of unguarded expression from the Original hybrid, amused warmth gleaming in his crystalline eyes, awkward good cheer there, head shaking from side to side, glancing away with that familiar boyish grin. "You're the oddest of women, sweetheart."

"Don't you forget it," she drawls, catching his gaze from above the rim of her crystal, locking it in, animal heat and ancient love in her eyes that makes his grin drop, makes his body go rigid. Taut with the volatile echoes of a millennia of complication, of stormy emotion, far too intense. And just as that elusive promise boils towards a breaking point, towards implosion, she sucks in a sharp breath and jerks back, smacking against the chair's frame in surprise, shaking her head as if it'd gotten away from her. "Are we flirting?"

Wry twist to his lips returning, Klaus retorts, "Evidently."

"We should stop that." She's focused on her tumbler, pushing it away from her reach with two fingertips, pushing until it clinks with his own. "I've had too much to drink."

"You're a vampire now, love. You can take it."

But Elena shakes her head. Traces a hand up to her cheek, tucking wavy chestnut tresses behind her ear, swishing the rest of it over her shoulder. Trying to compose herself, trying to decide what her composure should be, how her behavior should alter. She isn't sure. It's hard to figure these things out, as she is now, two different people but one, varying personality traits all converged into one mass, vying for prevalence. Confusing her. Most days, she thinks it's okay to just go with it. To not worry about who she is, what she's like, but just do what she wants to do, talk how she feels like talking, act as it comes naturally. Except here in New Orleans, here with Klaus and Elijah nearby, it isn't something she should do. Lose control. Stop thinking. She feels like she shouldn't do that.

"What you did to Mikael," he begins without preamble, tugging her frayed focus back to him, to the table, drifting contemplatively, deciding whether or not he really wants this acknowledged aloud between them. There are wolves wandering around the compound, crossing the atrium for the stairs or going out, passing like quiet ghosts completely uninterested in the couple there in their shadowed alcove, the adjacent chamber tucked through the grandiose archway. They are Hayley's wolves, hanging around because their queen is here, because this enemy territory offers sanctuary so long as she decides it does. His brother is upstairs somewhere, avoiding Hayley, avoiding them all. He isn't worried about someone eavesdropping. He doesn't care. The house is eerily echoingly hushed these days, post-apocalyptically hollow, caught in the grief and tragedy of poignant stillness. And having Elena so close, having her sweep in, teasing the silent promise of bringing movement, bringing life, bringing light, it makes him uneasy. He's always troubled by the prospect of wanting something as intensely as he wants her.

He wants what she doesn't know that she's promising merely by _existing_.

Elena waits. "Yes?"

He sits forward in his seat, body drawn towards her. "When you're like that, when you let the ugliness out, I can hardly tear my eyes away," he admits. Lowly, huskily, headily, the caress of his voice making her lashes shutter, her throat flushing, his words pulling primal desire up from the depths of her, reminding her of the joy and glory found in that primitive savage state they used to share, back when they were Niklaus and Tatia, back when they were both wolves and wild and couldn't be torn apart. "It's breathtaking. You burn bright like a dark star when you're bloodthirsty for revenge."

"You are sick," she says, but not unkindly, not condemningly. "Of course you're fascinated by backwards things. Perverse things. Normal people don't get captivated by brutality." She inhales and breathes out whisperingly heavy, "Hatred."

"It reminds me of who you used to be," he replies, reading her mind. "Who _we_ used to be." Arm stretching across the table, his warm rough fingers find her wrist, skin to skin with a faint electric charge, a static jump, lingering above her pulse point, making her gaze fixate there when he asks her, "Do you remember the first time you saw Mikael and I fighting?"

Elena swallows. Doesn't look up as she murmurs morbidly, "That wasn't fighting. He was brutalizing you. His own son. And for what?" She's angry all over again at the reminder of that, memory hot like coal, sparking like embers that could scar. That _have_ scarred.

Klaus's jade gaze gleams hungrily in the light of the glowing candles, fingers clenching tight for a second around her wrist, so tight it steals a gasp out of her parted lips, yearning and awe etched for just that second in his beautiful brooding features. The candlelight plays golden hues and shadows across that sculpted avenging archangel bone structure, those sharp Roman edges, making her miss old things. Making the girl that _has_ no ancient history with this man, monster, almost yearn for new things. For what could've been. "You nearly killed him."

Completely Tatia, she says darkly, "You shouldn't have stopped me."

Smiling at the familiar ferociousness shining through, bittersweetly amused, he tells her, "No. I shouldn't have." The bruising clutch of his fingers on her wrist loosens, straying lower until he's slipping his hand into hers, palm to palm, and they're fastening for only one moment. One telling significant moment. And then he pulls away, lets go of her, leans back, turns his eyes. Backs away from the dangerous edge.

"Alright," she whispers then, breaking the silence, pushing away from the table to her feet with a deep breath. "As interesting as this late night drinking truce has been, I should really be heading home. Apparently, Damon's back from the dead, which means there might be a way to get Bonnie back too. I know it's a long shot of course, but I have to try."

"Guess it's catching," he throws flippantly after her, underlain with bitter edges having to do with his own situation, nothing to do with hers.

Elena smiles, characteristic kindness in the expression, warmth and gracious selflessness. "They'll skin me alive if I'm not back soon. But if you can hold out for a bit, I'll be back. I'd like to see what I can do about your perpetual mommy problem." Wiggling ten long fingers playfully in the air as she backpedals through the archway into the atrium, she confides, "I've still got a bit of Other Side juice from the leviathan deal, y'know."

Swinging to his feet, following after her, he questions, "Why would you do that?"

The girl stops, smile disappearing. "A mother should never be without her child," she tells him softly, barely an emotional whisper, and he can see she's thinking of hers. Thinking of the daughter Esther ripped her away from. And with that exact thought in mind, Elena then adds, quite funnily, "Unless she's a psychotic bloodthirsty bitch."

He takes her arm when she tries to get away, pulling her still, herding her around, into him, her side hitting his chest, trapped in his space, in his grip. "Tatia—"

"Elena," she corrects firmly, quickly, before she softens. "I go by Elena. I'm mostly…"

"Yes," he says, because words escape her. Edge of his mouth tipping upward in humorous self-deprecating rue. "It grows ever more complex with each new evolution, doesn't it?"

"Yeah." The girl sighs. "Tell me about it." She slips from his grasp and heads for the door. But he grabs her arm back and spins her around again, crashing into a sudden stinging kiss, taking her face in his hands. And into his mouth, she says, "_Oh_."

Kissing her warmly. Deeply. Provokingly. Overpowering any possible sense of reservation. Of aversion. That burning thirsting hunger that's existed for more than a thousand years just so suddenly kindling up again in an instant, in a ferocity, never to be slaked. It's always there, in a banked state, simmering beneath the surface of them both, ready to be unleashed. To spark like a wildfire and destroy everything in its path. Everything it touches. Yearningly, they pull apart, that fire gnawing at them, eating through the thread of their respective control, their resistance. Their sanity. It takes resolve, takes clamoring to reclaim their senses to remember why this isn't a wise thing, a natural thing, the only thing to do. They pull apart, gasping for breath, fevered in a dizzy delirious way, aching with desire strung taut, denied for so long. A fire so powerful that the possibilities of it scares them both, keeps them from giving it free reign, maintains it banked. She drops down off her toes, away from him, dazed dilated eyes searching his face in surprise, lips swollen, skin alive with the heightened cry of her nerve endings. He pries his fingers off of her and forces his hands behind his back, locking onto his own wrist to keep them there, making the movement look casual, carefree, confident. _Unaffected_.

Elena walks out. Refuses to look back.

* * *

><p><em>"<em>_We all go a little mad sometimes, lover."_

_Elena kills a hunter, one of legendary The Five, to save her little brother. And she's cursed because of that act. Haunted by his ghost, by her insecurities, her sins, her lost loved ones. There are more than enough burdens to plague her with, too many as Elena, too much to take as Tatia, too torturous to contemplate. Crying mercy doesn't work, getting angry can't help, and she soon realizes there is nothing that can banish away her myriad scars. Hallucinatory forms or otherwise._

_Because he has an invested interest, Klaus abducts her from the Salvatores, whisking her away the second she runs out the door, throwing her down into a windowless sublevel safe room of his manor. To be locked away to wallow in her misery, her madness, for her own protection. Dragging her in by an arm barred across her collarbone, forced back against his chest as he walks her inside. She doesn't struggle, not really, but she's not happy about all this manhandling. Or the destination. And she makes him acutely aware of that fact, in little ways, making her resentment known. He doesn't care. Things have been bad between them since she became a vampire, complicating his plans, her attachment to the Salvatores only deepening when he'd wanted them to wane._

_Shoving her forward as the reinforced steel door bolts behind them, he puts so much force into it that she goes lurching. So she hits the bed, catching herself on her palms and a knee, swinging around to shoot him a glare. "Nice. This is your idea of helping? Why don't you just truss me up in a straitjacket?"_

_"__I do believe you are not grasping the severity of your situation, Elena. This is for your own good."_

_"__You can't just leave me in here!" she yells after him, starting forward with a panicked jolt of her racing heart when he turns his back and moves to abandon her. "Niklaus!"_

_"__Now you want my company?" he throws sharply, whirling around, that challenging heat in his blue eyes, green in the low light. Suddenly, the casual disinterest is hollow, the anger and resentment of his own surfacing, fueled by hurt and rejection and impatience. "What happened to wanting nothing to do with me? That's what you said, isn't it, love? At the council memorial, when I tried to reach out, and you were too good for my help. Vomiting up blood, being lured out by a hunter, but you wanted nothing from me."_

_Rolling her eyes, she huffs out a sigh. "I'm sorry, okay? I was just trying to—"_

_"__What?" he challenges._

_"__I don't know. Get a clean break. Uncomplicate things. It doesn't matter."_

_"__No," he agrees, meaning something pointedly else. "It really doesn't." He turns again, aiming for the door, when she's drawn after him. Over his shoulder, he lightly informs her, "Beware the hallucinations, my dear. They tend to take insidious shapes. They will know all your deepest secrets."_

_"__What would you know about it?" she asks, stopping him._

_Back to her, palm flattened to the steel of the door, Klaus answers, "I was afflicted by the same curse that has you now, love. Nine hundred years ago, I killed The Five."_

_"__You saw their ghosts? You hallucinated like this?"_

_"__Yes."_

_"__For how long?"_

_"__Fifty-two years, four months, nine days," he tells her softly. Severely._

_Taking a step towards him, her face crumbles in compassion, in pain and fear and sadness, something innately imploring in her voice when she whispers, "Oh, Niko_…_"_

_"__Thought that would've been something you'd know already," he counters, brushing off the heartbreak in her tone, the undeniably pure Tatia quality of it, rotating around to look at her with deceptively empty eyes. "Would've seen from the Other Side."_

_"__Purgatory is an unstable place. There was so much that I missed."_

_"__It's good you're accustomed to it. This will be very similar." Cruelly unsympathetic, he has only flippancy for her now, only more so because of her intense empathy. The brusqueness out of him makes her expression tighten, tears shining in her eyes turning angry, falling to wet her cheeks as she bites into her lip, shaking her head at him. She takes a step back in disgust and it wakes the urge in him to follow, to grovel, to get that look of love and pity and longing back in her gaze, which only makes him harsher with himself. With her. "I have no way to stop it, love. One day, the visions just went away. Fifty-two years. For you, it will likely be longer. If I can keep you alive. After all, you're so very vulnerable in comparison. You might not even make it through the day's end, despite my precautions."_

_"__Is there any good news?" she deadpans, still not looking at him._

_"__I warned you," he tells her darkly, hardening, finding that fury she stirred in him with all her interfering, all her putting herself at risk. "I told you the hunter was not to be killed."_

_"__You didn't tell me what would happen!"_

_"__I shouldn't have to!" he shouts back. And in the swift pitch to deafening silence stretched between them then, the words he won't say ring loudly, powerfully. _You should've trusted me.

_It's true. It's true and that stings, but not as much as the fact itself that she doesn't, that he can't quite trust her because of it, and the surprising yet so unsurprising truth of how badly he wishes he could. How badly he wants to._

_"__If you hadn't been off trying to find that stupid sword, you could've helped me protect my brother and I wouldn't have had to kill the hunter," she snaps, accusation and hurt in her eyes, as if he's failed her, even though she knows it's unfair, knows she doesn't have the right to feel this way when she's been treating him the way she has, and that look makes him angry again. So so freaking angry._

_Rushing her, he has his hand around her throat in a sudden split second, lifting her up onto her toes, scrabbling on the stone for purchase, choking for breath, his fingers crushing. "It's not my job to play guardian angel to every helpless idiot you insist on caring about!"_

_"__God, I hate you."_

_"__The sentiment is mutual, sweetheart."_

_But he stalks her backward, step for step, hand still holding her high by the bruised throat. He tosses her away so that she crashes into the bed again, bouncing off, and she rebounds back at him without pause, reaching out, snatching his arm before he can leave her, tugging at him. Because he can't just throw her like trash and turn his back. Her rasp, his sneer, like opposite chemicals finding middle ground, coming together to react explosively. She latches claws into the muscle of his forearm and jerks him back around to meet her swinging fist, pulling him to catch the punch she snaps at his jaw, ducking from the return he gives. Doubling over against the low quick jab he drives underhanded into her stomach, making her sputter out a gasp, making her eyes water._

_He stands still, towered above her, watching her recover. Her fingers drop away from him, clutching her midsection, choking on the forceful expulsion of air from her collapsed lungs. Though his expression is unmoved, he's anything but satisfied._

_"__Son of a bitch," she curses, shuddering it out._

_"__What is it you want from me, Elena?"_

_Rigidly, she straightens herself, catching her breath. "I don't know, alright? I never know." She inhales one long breath, steadies, compresses her lips. "You're just— It's hard."_

_Klaus falls silent, falls still, searching her face, searching into her for something._

_When the storm breaks, sweeps over them like the volatile rush of a tidal wave, a car crash, the impact is sudden and vicious. Grabbing her up by the nape of her neck, fingers twisting in dark hair, pulling her harshly against him. Colliding. They kiss hotly, hurriedly, soft mouths pressed hard, crushed, licking into him as she meets his ferocity, doesn't flinch. Gives it back as good as she gets, right there with him, caught in the storm._

_He rips from her lips, shoving her around, yanking her back against him by the delicate bend of her elbows, trapping her there. He tugs her out of her loose burgundy cardigan and pushes forward with her until her knees hit the edge of the bed, her blouse wrested impatiently over her head, her jeans wrenched open, shimmying denim down her thighs, gripping her hips tight in his hands. Elena cranes her neck, head tipped back, eyes hooded in a haze of desire and empowered emotion, her body alight. Fervent. Fingers tracing across him, grazing warm skin, digging into corded muscle, bucking off his restraint, spinning around to come at him herself, tearing at his clothes. She shoves the double-breasted jacket off his shoulders, gasping for air, his nose dragging down her jawline, his blunt teeth biting in. Bunches the cotton henley in her hands as she wriggles it upward, touch falling back down to press against his torso, his chest, exploring the ridges and valleys of his taut body, remembering its definitions, like it's hers. Like it belongs to her. Like it always have. Their fingers meet, mingle, unfastening his buckle, reeling his belt out. She catches the nape of his neck as he had hers, tugging him down into a provoking kiss, tongue and teeth and lips and just trying to consume each other, trying to rip each other open and crawl inside. To feel it in their bones. Too rough and too rushed and just fucking right. Fast and dirty. Needy and fierce. Angry. Hungry. Desperate. She drops down to her knees for just a second, flicking the button of his black jeans, pulling them open. He fists a hand in her hair and she's up again, crashing flush against him, conflict and disagreement and symbiotic striving, exactly as they always are._

_Palm between her shoulder blades, between her bra straps, he pushes down, pressing her to the mattress, bent facefirst into the bed. Her back arches, hips grinding against his to drag a groan from his throat. As they struggle, as they tangle up and clash and stretch their limits, reclaiming some long forgotten primordial imperative they've always known with each other. Lost in lust and heat and animal aggression and ageless need. For each other. For only ever _just_ each other. He tries to pin her down, tries to cover her from behind, but she can't be calm, can't be still, and she bucks off his pin, flips herself onto her back, plants a foot in his stomach and shoves him stumbling backward. Surges upward after him. She leaps and he catches her by the waist, one hand delving into her hair, open mouths sinking into each other. She wraps her legs around him and he drops into the nearest leather lounger behind him, letting her keep the higher ground, just for now, letting her move in his lap, undulating against him, atop him. Somehow, even without her own animal anymore, she's still as wild, as instinctive, as beastly. Somehow, even without hers, she still manages to dig inside him and find his wolf, manages to rouse him out to the surface, driving him mad._

_Their fleeting dreamlike affair was the last time he really touched her. The last time he was inside of her. And that didn't count. Okay, it counted, but not actually. She'd just taken Tatia in and everything was so _…_ adrift._

_But here, now, maybe she has the hunter's curse to blame, but it's not the same._

_His fingers skim up her writhing back, the set of her shoulders, plucking aside the straps of her bra, snapping the clasp of it to pieces, thumbing her breasts before they get crushed flat to his chest. Her own fingers are on his face, hands clasping his jaw, his cheekbones, kissing him like she's trying to devour the man, monster, enemy, lover, _mate_. They slide farther back and sink into the gold curls of his hair, cinching tight, and suddenly he gets wrenched from her lips, head forced back on the neck, looking up at her with crystalline eyes burning hard with heat. She yearns up on her knees, stretching taut, lingering above him, barely touching. Until he growls, grip tightening punishingly on her, ending the tease. They're tugging frantically then, pulling and pushing and coming together quick, hurried, impulsive._

_Klaus twists her panties off, sinks two fingers into wet pulsating fever, making her draw in a sharp breath, making her go rigid. Her fingers are fumbling at the elastic waistband of his boxers as his furl inside her. Pulling them out of the way, wrapping his cock, full and velvet to the touch, feverish and throbbing like herself, like her own need as her body clamps down on his knuckles, wanting him deeper._

_She shudders, two fingers of her free hand circling his wrist, prying it out, sinking down on him with one slow sure stroke. And against her mouth, as her lashes drop, as her lips part on a soundless breathy exclamation, he murmurs knowingly, "We all go a little mad sometimes, lover."_

_With his palm spread at the small of her back, providing support, urging her on, Elena is able to find patience through the frenzy. Forcing the raging hunger into a controlled simmer. Lazy and savoring but strung taut. She eases upward off him almost completely the first time, muscles of her thighs complaining, quivering, her knees digging into the leather cushion on either side of him, joints of her hips working as she sinks back down, embedding him inside, shuddering through the descent, his fingers in her hair, on her jaw, his mouth on her throat. Panting and sweaty and slick and burning and it's glorious. Dirty and primal and perfect. Eventually, after she's come apart more than once and her muscles are aching and control is snapping like an overpressurized rubber band, he gives up the submission, no longer content to just hold her, watch her, feel her. He surges off the chaise, slams her down onto her back beneath him, crushing her to the mattress in a dipping cloud of plush bedding. Thrusts hard into her, hammering intensely, driving deep, and she just holds on, limbs locked around him, cringing and crying out, the pressure too overwhelming, utterly unraveling._

_There are no ghosts when he's inside of her, when he's consuming her, no ghosts at all but the thousand restless spirits that linger between their shared skin._

_After he leaves, it's just one more thing hallucinations of Connor and Katherine can taunt her with though, twisting the knife in. "Klaus? Seriously? Have you no self-respect? Have you no respect for the people you love? The betrayal is just … epic. Unthinkable. And for what? Is it worth it? Getting fucked by the man that killed your aunt, your mother, your father. How can you look at yourself? He killed you. Twice really, if you want to count the first life. Because we both know none of what you suffered as Tatia would've happened if not for him."_

_"__Shut up, Katherine," she spits, vicious and defensive and so sick of it, sitting on the chaise, her clothes back on but the evidence still caking her skin, one knee drawn up onto the seat as she's rubbing at her pounding temples. "Shut up. Just go away."_

_But her doppelgänger's smug taunting is better than the sickened repulsion she gets from that damned hunter. She's sorry she killed him, but he's really making her not regret it at all. Besides, he tried to kill Jeremy. And her friends. What does she really have to feel guilty about? He deserved to die._

_Tatia tries to help fight it, help hold on to who she is, but she's spent the last year so ruthlessly burying the Tatia parts of her down, their balance is too fraught, too unstable now._

_She's sitting on the floor, rocking, hugging her knees by the time Stefan breaks in._

_For a second, just a second, she knows it's him. But then that sanity slips from her fingers and she doesn't see him for who he is, not until it's too late, until she's already shoved the iron through his gut, pinned him to the wall and run._

_At the bridge where she died, where her adoptive parents died, where everything changed, twice, the hunter and Katherine and Amara, who Tatia's had a contentious relationship with for the thousand years she spent imprisoned in purgatory, Elena's mother, they all batter at her resolve, fraying her sanity, convincing her to end her own life. They aren't the real people. They are just visions. For hours, she told herself that, tried to hold onto the thought, tried to remember it through their confusing words. But now … now that's gone. She resists to the very last moment, her feet at the edge, looking down into the cursed water, hanging by a thread, until the final ghost appears._

_Tatia's daughter says, "It was your fault. Your love for those monsters ruined us then and it will again. You failed me, Mother. My whole life, every agony I endured, it was all because of you. Your selfish choices." And then, hugging her tight, she whispers into her hair, "Mother, please, I love you. But you have to do it. You deserve this."_

_"__I deserve this," Elena chokes, head nodding, tears streaming. Weeping at the despair and agony in her chest, ripping her apart. Bringing her to her knees when her daughter lets go. Sobbing, "I'm so sorry."_

_Daylight ring dropping into the river, the sun comes up burnt orange and pink over the dark tops of the trees in the distance, cindering her skin. She's almost dead when Damon saves her life, hunter's curse broken. All the while, a part of her is wondering why it wasn't Niklaus._

* * *

><p>Before she leaves New Orleans, Elena stops by Elijah's rooms upstairs, not looking forward to this talk but knowing she owes it to him to have it. Walks in as he's brooding. As he's pining for Hayley, fixating on Tatia and old sins, worrying about the red door.<p>

When she was just Elena, she was just a human girl with a strong compassionate heart and an empathetic intuition that kept her so attuned to the emotions of all the people around her. Kept her adept at reading them, even when she tried to not see, to not care. Even when all she wanted was to be young and selfish and stupid, to lose herself in a haze of alcohol and fun and a never-ending party. Even then, she could never quite turn it off, her worried heart, but since her trip to the Other Side and her changed return, that intuition has become something broader and stronger than a caring girl's instinct. It's become something supernatural. So when she opens up her inner walls, probes out, she can find all sorts of things she's not meant to know. And when it's distress this prominent, coming from someone she knows so well, someone she cares about, her empathy reaches for it even without her conscious effort. Or conscious consent.

She senses his troubled thoughts, the psychological powder keg suppressed by thin restraint, and hesitates in the doorway, realizing his mother worked him over more than she'd assumed. Her concern for his state turns to wariness. Dread.

"Elijah?" she calls softly, not wanting to startle him. But he was aware of her presence before the second she stepped foot on the top stair. Entering the room, she shuts the door carefully and crosses towards where he stands staring out the dark glass of a window. Candlelight and shadow play tricks on the shapes and moves of the room, his distracted reflection faint in the black glass. "You're thinking of the red door. I told you to not do that."

"What is it you know, Tatia?" he inquires, voice stoic like his expression. Remote.

"Don't call me that," she warns.

"Why? It's who you are, is it not?"

"You shouldn't think of me that way," she tells him, fingers furling restlessly into her palm. "It won't do you any good, my friend."

"You don't speak to me as Elena. Why should I call you by that name?"

"Elijah," she sighs, looking away, feeling the weight of history bearing down on her shoulders as she stands behind him, almost beside him, wanting to reach out. "I don't know all of what she told you in that tomb, but the red door is more than some mental metaphor. It's true that what it represents is the hidden things, the things we have to deceive from ourselves in order to survive, and it's true that it can be anything, a smooth bottomless black lake, a dark well, because it's just a symbol. Different minds conjure different forms of it. But the door itself is a barrier for souls, for our minds, and it is a witch's work, Elijah. I saw a lot of this in purgatory, the unreal plane, this way of reaching more than just the world we can touch with our bodies. The place you hide your secrets from yourself isn't unlike the Other Side, the place on the other side of the red door, but it's a confusing place. It's easily misconstrued."

"I'm not sure I understand what you're describing."

"We all have it, the red door, every one of us that has touched the other planes, us monsters. We have our own versions of it, but the other side of those doors, the bottom of those wells and depths of those lakes, it's all the same place. Like purgatory. And if you know what you're doing, you can touch someone else's, bleed it into yours, manipulate its surface. You can use someone's deepest truth, most powerful emotion, to turn it against them. That's what the leviathans like to do to their victims. They're masters of that malleable plane."

"Fascinating," he comments flatly, hands in his pockets, gaze still fixed on the black glass. He's hearing her, but he's not listening, because he doesn't think it matters.

Frustrated, worried, Elena breathes in deep, licks her lips, lays a hand on his upper arm, sliding into his line of sight, head tipped imploringly. "I don't know what she did, or what you saw on the other side, because I didn't go through your door. I was on the outside. But you went farther and you obviously learned something that stuck with you after I pulled you out."

"I'm fine, Elena." Softening into his usual countenance, Elijah finally meets her eyes and offers the girl a reassuring look. "I owe you a debt for rescuing me. I will remember."

Not so easily diverted, she persists, "In the motel, you said you killed me. Is that something you experienced on the other side of the red door?"

"I recalled memories I'd buried a long time ago. That is all."

"Elijah—"

"_Elena_," he cuts her off, suddenly sharp, suddenly stark. His features harden, going cold and empty like glittering black stone, reminding her of the way he'd seemed in her dream. "Enough." Shirking her fingers off his arm, he turns and brushes unkindly past her. "Go home."

"I'm not going anywhere until I know you're alright."

"What business is it of yours?"

"I'm just trying to understand."

"Understand?"

"What's going on in there, Elijah." Taking his shoulder, she turns him around to face her and touches graceful fingertips to his temple. Caring. Pleading. "You're not feeling like yourself."

"You're right," he replies, catching her hand in his grasp, pulling it gently down. Their eyes lock and a moment of intensity arcs between them, connection, disquiet. Pulling close, he's only a hairsbreadth from her when he says in a low tone, "I'm seeing this genuinely for the first time. I'm finding my choice."

"Seeing _what_?" she whispers, arching against his nearness, arching unconsciously away as the dark burn in his eyes stirs something like distraught alarm deep down inside somewhere. Her fingers curve over his arm, bunching in his lapels, gripping tight. Her pulse is picking up speed and her heartbeat is getting heavier and she can't say why. "Elijah, what choice?"

Those dark amber eyes go black, thickening with red, veins around them crawling. He bands a hand around her wrist so strongly the bone cracks, wrenching the girl across the meager gap to crush her against his body, unmoved by her startled gasp, by the panic and confusion and hurt etching quicksilver flickers through her face. It all happens in an abrupt split second, too quick, too unexpected for her to react. He says darkly, throatily, "This one." And then he strikes. Crushing her wrist, catching the back of her head in his palm as she pulls back, forcing her into him as he curves under her jaw, into the vulnerable column of her throat, sinking in sharp teeth. Rending flesh. Pulling down the hot red gush of blood that flows free from beneath his mouth. Unraveling her surety.

And when he has her too tight to struggle, too tight to escape, his wide strong hand moves out of her hair to cover her lips, smothering her scream. Maybe she could've done something to defend herself, to hurt him, but she didn't want to. Even as he's draining her dry, she won't hurt Elijah. She knows it's not his fault. She can't believe he knows what he's doing. Can't believe he means to kill her. He'll stop. She keeps telling herself that, keeps thinking it as he drinks deep, hunched over her, against her, jerking her upward when her legs give out and her head falls back until there's nothing left and she slips to the floor, spilled at his feet, bloody and sallow, her eyes dropped closed, her chest unrising. _He'll stop. He'll stop._

_He won't really hurt me._

Faith is a dangerous thing. A deadly thing. She knows that better than anyone. Tatia. Elena. Her unwavering faith in people in the face of overflowing evidence against them has led to more than a few close calls. More than a few betrayals. But she never abandons it. Never gives it up. There will be a day it kills her, and she knows that, but she won't let go. Surrender is something she isn't capable of, in her soul, in her bones. She chooses her battles, has freely admitted defeat more than once, but the war is never over.

When she wakes, Elena fights to lift her lashes, fights to push herself painstakingly upright. Looks around the room. She's been laid bloodied and weak in his bed, the balcony door swinging open in the wind of a brewing storm, rolling thunder echoing in the distance.

Elijah is nowhere to be found.


	5. Part IV

_You'll never know what hit you..._

Blood smearing handprints across the walls, wetting polished wood in her wake, Elena gets herself out of Elijah's rooms, gets herself down the open-air corridors, using walls and railings for support as she heads down the wraparound landing above the atrium, aiming for the stairs. Bloody and haggard, only alive because she can't die, not like this, she makes it to the opening corner of the steep staircase delving down into the cavernous court. Finds the hybrid king busy arguing with Marcel across the way, towards the deep main tunnel, standing toe to toe and each man vehement in what they're discussing. Klaus is soaked, fresh in from the cold pounding rain, the furious lightning that cracks loudly overhead flashing white shards of jagged light across the darkness of the night. Leather jacket wet, his sandy curls slicked down, water droplets fall from his lush red lips as they move rapidly, fast with fervor, his lilted voice grounded low and husky with the repression of a growl vibrating down in his diaphragm. She opens her mouth to call out, no sound forming, her throat too dry, her body too dry. Gripping white-knuckled to the wooden railing going down, she eases from step to step, feet leaden and graceless.

Without turning around, he senses her through his preoccupation and says, "Thought you'd be on the first flight back to Virginia." But then the flippant smile drops and his features harden at the macabre sight of her there as he revolves, triggered by Marcel's grave gaze gravitating past his shoulder towards her, heated discussion drifting off.

She's midway down the staircase when the last embers of strength give out and she folds, spilling downward with a shuddered gasp, crimson dripping. Splinters embed in her fingertips because they try to clutch to the rail, ripping along as she falls. He blurs into motion the second her body starts to faint, so she doesn't get far. Catching her up, his arm curved along her back, another scooping her up from behind the knees, he takes her off the stairs to set her perched on the edge of the atrium fountain.

"Somebody worked you over well," Marcel comments, standing behind the hybrid.

With a tug to his leather jacket's sleeve, exposing his wrist, Klaus holds his wrist before her, crouched in front of the slumped girl, other hand resting lightly on her knee. It takes her a beat, moving sluggish, brain slowed down, only semi conscious, only primordial instinct reminding of what she needs to survive, what she needs to do. Blood. Sustenance. _Food_. She needs lifeblood to revive herself before she falls into desiccation. When that instinct registers with the offer of rich potent red flowing in the strong vein beneath the skin so near her mouth, she latches onto his forearm, fingers pressing down deep. Head turning into him, fangs sliding into his flesh, eyes shutting at the hot gush of copper as it floods her tongue. Revitalizing.

"Bring me someone," he says to the younger man, unthinking command tossed negligently.

Marcel could bristle under the authoritarian arrogance, a lesser vampire surely would have, but he is not so insecure as to think anything of it. "Any preferences, baby doll?" he asks the girl, meeting her drowsy gaze over Klaus's head as her lips unlatch. One hand resting lazily on a hip, the other scrubbing lightly through his beard, quipping drolly, "Light meat, dark meat? Male, female? Fresh, vintage?"

"Move it along," Klaus growls mildly, while Elena just summons a weak smile, lashes aflutter as she struggles to keep them raised.

Setting a quelling hand to the hybrid's shoulder, she says, "Thank you, Marcellus."

Surprise flickers faintly through his charming dark-skinned features, questions in his eyes he won't ask, curiosity mingled with a hidden undercurrent of suspicion. "No problem, gypsy girl." And then he's gone, a blurred streak of sleek superspeed motion, skirting out of the compound and onto the street to find her someone to feed from. Something more replenishing than just a few healing sips off Niklaus.

Sire blood only goes so far, even when it is the hybrid king.

Once they're alone, hush of the empty court intensifying the muted din of the storm outside, he demands her focus with his silence, his searing quiet, and when she's looking straight into his vivid crystalline eyes, he demands calmly, coldly, "Who?"

Heavy-lidded and grim, she rasps, "Elijah."

Klaus draws back. Blinks in shock. "Come again?"

Which is when Marcel returns, random thirty-something in tow, overhearing their words. "Man," he exclaims lowly, laidback, whistling softly as he hands the compelled guy over. "What'd you do to piss off the aristocrat?"

"It doesn't matter," Klaus argues, moving out of the way when she takes hold of the human, rising to stand a ways back. "Elijah would never harm Elena."

Reddened eyes, canines extended, she hesitates over the guy's pulse point, telling the hybrid, voice grated, "Well, he did." She bites in harder than she means to, making the man hiss in pain, drinking deep. Back arching, soon as she gets feeding, she tugs him close, fingers digging in deep and bruising. More vehement than typical. As her body leans and undulates over the fountain's pristine waters, dragging him with her, taking way too much, red drips from the fingers gripped to his nape, drizzling down her forearm off her elbow into the clean blue. One knee spreading, curving around his waist in a vice. When she finally sates herself, lets go, the guy slips from her body to slump unconscious on the stone. She takes a minute to savor the rush of renewed energy from the feed, of warm satisfaction, and then she swipes the excess from her chin and looks up to address the palpable pressure of their weighted gazes. "Something's wrong with him, Niko. Esther did something to his mind."

Shoulder to shoulder with the hybrid, watching her speculatively, Marcel has his hand on his hip again, wary expression etched into his handsome face when he says, "See, this is exactly why I vote we put the white oak stake through Papa Mikaelson and be done with it already." Angling toward Klaus, he adds, "When has keeping a murdering Original on a rampage incapacitated in the cellar ever worked out well?"

"You kept Mikael alive?" she accuses, focus swinging, suddenly sharpening.

Klaus glares right back. "He could come in handy with my mother, love. You don't waste leverage like that."

"Esther doesn't care about _him_," she dismisses, surging to her feet. Meridian swirls through the sparkling blue flow of the fountain behind her. Fierily, "He's a monster, like the rest of us. She'll want him cleansed from the earth just the same."

"Oh, see, you missed some things, sweetheart. Seems my mother's had a change of heart since her last unwelcome resurrection."

"She has one of those?" Elena drawls sarcastically, passion settling to a simmer as she cocks a hip and purses her mouth, gaze casting absently to their surroundings.

"It's not our eradication she wants from us anymore. She's deteriorated so far into delusions that she actually thinks we can be one big dysfunctional family again once she's ripped us from our forms and placed us in the bodies of witches. Even almost lured Hayley in with the promise of a new beginning as a wolf once more."

"Esther's promises are poison," she murmurs, half to herself, kneeling down to check on her victim's pulse rate. Spilling a touch of vampire blood into his mouth.

There is nothing harmless about his wolf grin. "Believe me, love, I know it."

"And what is she doing using Traveler magic anyway?" she demands.

Shifting weight, Marcel interjects, "What do you know about Traveler magic, gypsy girl?"

She tosses a look over her shoulder at the bluesman, eyebrow winged, but doesn't answer. Speaking to Klaus, she drawls, "You never told him."

Waving it off, he says, "Irrelevant."

"I'm inclined to disagree," Marcel mentions.

Ignoring him, Klaus steps forward, lays out a hand, pulling her to her feet when she takes it. Asking Elena, "Do you know where my brother has gone?"

"No, but I can guess."

* * *

><p><em>After she walks out on the Salvatore brothers, after killing that unfortunate waitress and leveling them with her ultimatum, Elena leaves them to stew over their choice and heads back to her hotel room while everybody else is scurrying back to Mystic Falls. Rebekah left her fast behind the second their goals no longer aligned, and that's just fine, because she's good on her own these days. Better than she is with the people of her past life. People still expecting her to act like a dead girl, a girl she buried with her brother's ashes, a girl who isn't coming home. Today has cemented that sentiment, the reason she'd wanted to blow town to begin with, Stefan and Damon and Elijah reminding her of that with their every glance, soured with pity and disappointment. Chasing down Katherine with Rebekah was the closest she ever came to feeling alright, feeling like she could be who she is now but still get something back from her old life, her <em>old_ old life. It made her remember that there was a time she and the baby Original got along just fine. Fantastically in fact. In another life._

_Everything's in another life for her these days._

_She comes in, pulling off Katerina's killer pumps, dropping her bag, tossing her stolen keys, shrugging out of her jacket. She's tired, and hungry, and entirely irritatingly dissatisfied with how this roadtrip turned out. About to order up some room service, more interested in the boy that will be delivering than whatever she picks off the menu, Elena suddenly stills, freezing on her way into the chic marble bathroom. Senses someone behind her, absent eyes flashing wide, spins to find Elijah standing at the threshold of the balcony, sheer eggshell drapes rustling in the Pennsylvania breeze, glass doors swung open, his hands hidden in the pockets of his slacks. Poised as ever._

_"__Thought you would have gone with Rebekah," she drawls, relaxing from the rigidity his appearance put in her. Looking bored, she slouches gracefully against the bathroom doorjamb and wets her mouth deliberately. Resists a victorious smirk when his gaze follows._

_Despite the unconscious tell, he is stone cold as he says, "We have unfinished business."_

_"__Do we?"_

_"__Elena—" And then he stops. Changes his mind. Decides to test the waters. "Tatia?"_

_In her red and white floral sundress, not even close to reaching her knees, she moves across the room towards him, slow and silken like a lethal black panther, but her lethality comes from something more subtle than physicality. She leans back against the writing desk near his place at the balcony doors and crosses her ankles, head tipped, emotionless mask feigning kindness. "Sure. If that's what you want to call me. It's all the same really."_

_Not liking that answer, he drops the tactic. Speaks as if it's only Elena when he tells the girl, "I'm sorry for your brother. Truly, I am. But this isn't you. You don't hide from hurt. You don't hide from anything."_

_"__Except you," she counters evenly. "I hid from my feelings for you. As Elena, and as Tatia before her, because I wouldn't do that to Niklaus, because I wouldn't do that to Stefan."_

_Elijah doesn't say anything, but his head cocks a notch unconsciously, dark squinted eyes blinking thickly in that contemplative way of his, that composed way that conceals his feelings. And yet it doesn't at all. Not to her. Never has._

_She uses that understanding to twist the knife. "It's kinda funny, in a sad way, how we've all done that to you. Loved you. Put someone else ahead of you. And Katherine too!" she laughs with genuine amusement, cruelty a byproduct. "Though with her, there wasn't another man. Just herself." Uncrossing her ankles, she pushes off the antique writing desk and prowls one step at a time his direction. "Tell me, Elijah, which stings worse? The first, I bet. It's always the first love that digs the deepest wound."_

_"__Your self-worth has risen exponentially since losing your humanity."_

_"__Maybe I'm just seeing clearly for the first time," she suggests, a slow smile blooming._

_"__I could compel you to feel again."_

_"__But you won't. Because then you'd have an unstable broken down basket case on your hands and nobody wants that." Stopping right in front of him, chin lifted, looking up at his seemingly immovable countenance, knowing better. Voice losing its lilted whimsy, its barbed playful deception, she speaks softly, lowly, powerfully. "So why did you come back, Elijah? Because it wasn't for this conversation."_

_Casting his attention to the side, he takes in a composing breath and decides to inform her, "Katherine handed over the cure."_

_"__She's gambling awfully high," she comments, eyebrows rising in mild surprise. "So, what? You've come to offer it to me? To give me back that precious fragile flame of being human? Like that will make everything better. So you can go back to admiring me from afar?" The acid masked with humor and mocking in her tone cuts deep, reveals the vulnerability of bitterness that still lurks beneath her inhuman veneer. Patronizing drawl turning thoughtful, she adds, "No, I don't think so. You know how much your baby sister wants a human life. You wouldn't do that to her."_

_"__Come home with me," he implores. "Let your friends be there for you."_

_"__Is that what you really want?" she challenges, head tilting upward towards his mouth, arching centimeters apart, tantalizingly close, just shy of touch. "To take me home? Hand me off to the overbearing Salvatores? Is that what you want to do with me, Elijah?"_

_She's been baiting him into reaction since the second she saw him, the second he stepped up into the bridal wreath soaked gazebo, quaint and picturesque and very all wrong for the sort of ugly twisted things she feels. Leaned back lazily on her haunches, slouched and sitting and spinning idly, unconcerned cruel amusement in the curve of her lips, the gleam of her eyes as they watch and mock and hide. Egging him on. Wanting him to rile. Not only self-destructive but indiscriminately destructive since she switched off._

_The more he stays stoic, the more she should be put out, but she half doesn't care one way or the other. When he remains placid, reserved, refusing her goad, she huskily laughs it off, brushing dismissively past him. Saying baldly, like she's done with him, "Get out."_

_Before she's gotten far, he has turned after her. Grabs her arm, yanking her back to him as he had earlier in the afternoon, the last time she tried walking away from this man. She laughs again the second he takes hold of her, pulling her back, reacting the way she'd knew he would, hoped he would. It's a short insulting sound, rich with satisfaction. He leans in, she arches back within his controlling grasp, a teasing smile on her lips, eyes alight with mirth and victory at his desire. His longing. He palms the back of her head so she can't evade and crushes her into a strong sweet kiss, all the more stinging for it, and she bites punishingly through his lower lip, angry at the things he makes her feel that she hadn't expected to. Hadn't counted on. He is just as quiet and intense through his unwavering composure as ever and it frustrates the vampire. Even when he's giving into what he wants, what he denies himself, he's still so unflappable that it pisses her off. She's mean and hurting and empty all at once and the only thing keeping her going is the ugliness, the desire to see these powerful people come apart. She wants his control to unravel. She wants him as broken down as she is. She wants him to be honest with himself. But he won't break, won't shake, even as he's matching her spite. He just slides his hands up the sides of her bare legs, under the flimsy skirt of her summer minidress, twisting off her panties, and makes her burn._

_He kisses her like he's wanted to kiss her for centuries, like he's angry at her for souring those feelings, ruining his image of her, shattering that pedestal he's had her on. Angry at her for not being the woman he wants her to be, the woman she used to be, because so much has happened to destroy her, to destroy them and the way they were. The way they could've been. It's like he loves her and he hates her and he wants to shove everything built up over millennia into her so that she can understand what it's like being him, like he's trying to force himself to the inside of her, as if he can find that lost woman and drag her out._

_It won't work, but she lets him try._

_One arm snaking between her legs as his knees dip, his muscled forearm presses against the oversensitized heat of her core and he grips the curve where her backside meets her thigh in his hand, lifts her up against him, high above him, opposite arm hugging about her waist, crushing her to him, kissing her hard. The dress is flipped up and her legs are spread wide and hitched around him, knee digging into his side, the other on his hip, calf locked across his back. She has her arms on his neck, gripping his shoulders, tugging at the soft dark hair of his head as he tips it backward to meet her mouth now above him, her body bowed over him where he's raised her._

_The wind coming in from the open balcony doors at her back rustles through her tresses, shivering over the heated nerves brought alert in her skin, small town lights shining in. Any of the possible prying eyes could see a lot more than just their silhouette there._

_Tugging at his tie, she winds it around her palm, pulled taut, fingers flicking down the line of buttons in his white dress shirt, shoving the suit blazer off his shoulders, keeping herself up with just the cinch of her legs around him. Once it's off, his hands come back, taking her head between them, bracketing her face, delving and tightening in the messy silk fall of her chestnut waves spilling all around them. Grips her tight, crushing her mouth, tongue stroking inside to tangle and lick. Her hips grind down against him and his teeth catch the corner of her lips in a quick reflex. She sucks in a sharp hiss, breathing his air, forgetting if she had a plan with this game or not. Eyes reddening, veins rising varicose, canines extending, she breaks from his kiss to trail hot presses of wet lips along his jawline, nosing below it into the underside of his chin, down towards the pulsating warmth of his throat. Head bent over his neck, teeth finding skin, she hugs him tighter to her, all her limbs locked around him, squeezing fierce, and bites in with a hungry intoxication. Pulls his blood with long savoring draws, consuming him in every way she can, spine arched, body purring lustfully. He spins around with her, carries her to the bed, setting her down beneath him with contradictory gentleness._

_When she draws off, head hitting the pillow, vampire eyes receding, his blood dripping from her chin, Elena tries to turn rough. Tries to make this fast and greasy, hard and dirty, something to mask the stewing powder keg of unspoken unfelt emotion and sincerity that lies in his eyes, in his hands on her skin, that locked box buried six feet deep and fervently ignored. But he catches her cheek, pulling up as she aims for his mouth, trying to capture him back into a bruising kiss. He avoids it, quells her back down, softening the girl despite her best efforts, despite the aggravation it provokes. He won't let her kiss him, drink him, flip them and ride him hard and unkind, because he's stripping her bare, down to the last scrap, and mapping the contours of every surface, remembering the terrain. Grazing over her with warm wide hands and precise lips. Dissolving her into a puddle of shivering quivering helpless frustration that makes her completely forget the new Elena._

_For just a moment. For just this spell. All night long, in an ebb and flow of conflict and symmetry twined together, losing themselves in each other._

_They make love._

_In the morning, his cell ringing wakes him. The bed is empty and the balcony doors are still swung open, drapes blowing, Rebekah impatient on the phone. "Just some delays," he tells her, dark solemn eyes on the vacant space leading into the light. "I'm on my way."_

* * *

><p>"What the hell do you mean, <em>Elijah's gone dark<em>?"

"Keep calm, little wolf. We'll get him back," Klaus drawls, a wryly amused smile on his lips as his blue eyes glimmer. Banked violence for the sins against his brother lurk like shadow beneath, but the surface is all his typical humor, wicked and playful and taunting.

Before the woman on edge can jump down his throat, visibly gearing up to do so as her dark flat gaze snaps sideways to his, Elena intercedes with a buffering, "Esther's messed with his head and he's gone, presumably to join her and Finn. We're working on solutions."

"Do we need a witch?" Hayley questions, straight to the pertinent stuff. Succinct. Ready to do whatever needs doing. Anxious to forge ahead.

Elena opens her mouth to answer when the phone in her back pocket starts ringing loudly, vibrating against her skin. She slides it out, takes one look at the name on the screen, and knows she can't ignore it. Not again. So she holds up a finger, tipping her head in gesture for the boys to take over, and steps to the side as she answers the call. Bringing the cell to her ear, she stands in the shadow of the atrium belvedere frame, the false privacy of the entrance tunnel keeping her voice low when she acknowledges apologetically, "Caroline."

"You won't believe this, but Alaric's human," her best friend jumps right in with.

Taken aback, it takes her a second to respond. "_What_? How'd that happen?"

"There was this wreck and he ended up over the border into Mystic Falls, and he was dying, you know, but then Jo saved his life and now he's human again! Long story short."

"Jo saved him? _My_ Jo? How?"

"Just kickass doctor stuff. Nothing supernatural."

"Oh, my God," Elena breathes in shock. Wonder. Her mind is spinning with possibilities, working it out fast. "Caroline, do you realize what this means?"

"Believe me, I realize it."

Which makes her frown. "Hold on. You're not thinking of crossing the border, are you?"

"Of course I've thought about it!" the blonde exclaims, exasperation and excitement in her high bubblegum tone. "Unfortunately, I don't know how I'd be saved from magical suffocation." The pivot her voice does from Point A to Point B makes Elena smile, despite the topic at hand, that familiar way she drops abruptly from exuberant to dry caustic drawl. "And you…"

"Drowning. I know. It's not really something a doctor can help me with."

"Well, I guess it's good I like myself better as a vampire," Caroline is saying, looking ever on the bright side of course. But the brunette only half hears her, because she's rotated around and looked up through the shuttered cast of her long dark lashes, from her downcast face, and found Klaus watching her. He's across the room, in the thick of a vehement discussion, but his eyes are fixed intently on Elena, locking stares when she turns, silent and intensely attentive to the wrong conversation as Hayley and Marcel argue around him. "Elena? _Hello_. Are you even listening? We need to brainstorm this!"

"Yeah," the girl murmurs, regretting that she can't claim the same as her sweetheart friend. To be human again… Lord, how she would choose that. If she could. As much as she revels now in her vampirism, in the upsides it gives, it was never her choice to be this way. She would want to reclaim her humanity, no matter what, even though she knows it couldn't be a clean slate that wiped all of her red debts away. If she can't ever be a wolf again, and she can't, because that gift comes with birth, she'd want to be human. If she could. If there was a chance. Then again, that would put a glaring red target on her back, an alive human doppelgänger.

He'd never want that, but she thinks about Klaus, about the way he died, run through with Mikael's sword. And Elijah. And—

Oh, man. _Rebekah_. That was all she ever wanted, to be human again, to have a life, a family. She wonders if she would risk it. Wonders how long it took her to die, before she transitioned, how possible it would be to save her with today's medicine.

"We need to consider this from all angles," Marcel is saying, very rationally.

To which Hayley impatiently interrupts, "No, what we need to do is go and get him back before The Wicked Witch That Wouldn't Die destroys his body and stuffs him into some hapless practitioner on a leash."

"We don't even know how to undo what she did yet, even if we could find him. You didn't see what he did to his girl over there. I'm thinking Elijah's not gonna be so easy to talk down."

Caroline has gone quiet, and Elena is so busy speaking volumes with Klaus without words that she doesn't realize why until the bubbly blonde cuts in. "You're messing with _witches_ again, Elena? Are you kidding me? I thought you knew better."

She rolls her eyes. "Stop eavesdropping, Caroline. Elijah's in trouble. I'm lending a hand. Promise I'll be back soon and we'll sort this all out."

"Damon's not going to wait much longer."

"Damon's got nothing to do with me," she counters archly.

But her friend warns, "Just because you don't remember him—"

Sharply, she interjects, "I'm not getting into this right now, Care. I've gotta go."

"_Don't you dare hang up on me again, Elena Gilbert_!"

It's too late. She's swiped across the screen and cut the call off. Stuffing the cell back into her pocket after she turns the ringer on silent, she breathes in quick and lets it out, moving to rejoin the others. "There _is_ no talking him down. It won't make a difference." As their heads turn to her when she approaches, she ignores the way Klaus's gaze is still burning intrusively into her skin and tells the younger two, "Esther has wormed her way in too deep for that."

Marcel mildly inquires, "If he can't be reasoned with because of Momma's magic, what is it you think you're gonna do?"

"I need inside his mind. If I can get close enough, I can get in there, I think I may be able to untangle the web she's woven."

Folding her arms, closing off, Hayley sounds understandably skeptical, a little bit belligerent, when she counters, "And we're just supposed to trust you in Elijah's head?"

"I would never hurt Elijah."

"Messing with his mind, I'd call that hurting."

"Hayley," Klaus mentions, casually intervening. The first word he's spoken since overhearing what Caroline had to say. His gaze still never strays from Elena. "As odd as it sounds, there is no one more trustworthy than her. When it comes to my brother."

"How do we know she won't just twist him her way?"

"Because sweet Elena is a saint," he quips, only half teasing. "She'd never jeopardize noble Elijah's freewill. Too many lofty principles for that."

Meeting his loaded gaze, she replies, "You mock, but you know it's the truth."

"I do."

"I need to talk to you before we do anything," she adds, starting forward. Meaning to pass him for the stairs, meaning for him to follow, knowing he'll have plenty to say about the recent revelation of the Mystic Falls border magic and not wanting whatever his likely volatile reaction will be to combust while they're all in the middle of a moment more precarious than this one. Better to air it out now, where they can control the situation.

But before she gets more than a step, Hayley cuts coldly into her way, territorial over Elijah, maybe over Klaus too, but making sure the interloper knows right where they stand regardless. Toe to toe with the vampire, intimidatingly serious, the hybrid warns, "Just keep the witch bitch head tricks to a minimum, alright?"

Instead of bristling or backing down, Elena is silent, calmly studying the other woman, searching into her. She won't meet that hostility, that posturing, because she sees the pain and twisted dark thorns dripping with blood inside. And she understands it all too acutely. Just like an avalanche of remembered turmoil, still present in the depths of herself, a wound unhealed, even if it's scarred over. And she gets the wariness, the suspicion, because it's fueled by fear. Great terrifying fear for the ones she loves. Finally, deciding something, she lifts a hand and lays it gently but firmly over Hayley's heart, confusing the hybrid. Startling her.

The men watch wide-eyed as she taps into that locked down simmer inside herself, calls up the juice and lets it out, commands it instinctively. Naturally. Perfectly. Using that otherworldly power to cleanse her, as she had freed poor tormented Stefan from his demons those years ago, freshly resurrected. Flash of sheer white expands like a sunburst from her, consuming Hayley, making Klaus and Marcel stumbles back, twisting away, arms thrown up over their faces as it blinds them, as the kiss of it stings. Hayley cries out. Klaus shouts unsurely, pushing through it towards them for a heartbeat, but then the burst recedes.

When the light ebbs, Hayley drops heavily to her knees, gasping and clutching at her chest, brown soulful eyes wide in alarm, astounded and stricken. Shocked and awed. Looking up at Elena abruptly like an angel, like the sun, like she never imagined such wonder. "It feels … so … so … _better_," she breathily exclaims. Not understanding it. Her shuddering breaths turn to shaky unburdened laughter. A rich wild sound.

Klaus steps up protectively, warily, glancing between the girls, a little leery of asking Elena, "What did you do to her?"

The woman intercedes before she can answer, amazement and emotion thickening her husky raw voice. "I still want her," she says, gazing up with unguarded relief at the vampire who's not nearly just a vampire. "I still miss my baby. But the pain … the pain is _gone_! From everything, it's just gone." And then, struggling to rise, "What did you do to me?"

Catching her by the elbow when she sways, he tells the little wolf, "She healed you. Inside. I've seen her do it just once before, love." Turning to Elena, "I didn't think you could do it again. Without the rider."

"The rider's been gone a long time now," she assures, knowing that loaded look in his eyes. "This isn't from him. This is … an _evolution_ I undertook on the Other Side. Before coming back."

"I don't understand."

"I'm still pretty vague on it myself."

Hayley suddenly pushes in, forcing Klaus aside, knocking into Elena, trapping her in a hug. A fierce clasp of bodies. Burying her face in Elena's wavy hair, inhaling the scent of rose hips and mint tea leaf, she breathes, so out of character, "Thank you. _Thank you_."

"Yeah," the girl returns, holding Hayley back, after a minute of frozen surprise, after lifting her arms and closing a little awkwardly around her. "Sure thing. Don't mention it."

Frown furrowing his sandy brow, Klaus watches this unhappily. Pleased that Hayley seems so freed, but feeling inherently suspicious, because the reaction is so unlike her. One would have expected her to be angered, bristling at the invasion, at the liberties taken, affecting her mindset. He knows Elena well enough, and Tatia too, to know the feeling is unfounded. He knows her too well to think she would use someone like Hayley for her own means, to think this is some sort of manipulative deception. Some sort of trap. She wouldn't. And yet still, his suspicion can't help but needle. He's just so used to the other shoe dropping. Just so accustomed to these sorts of supernatural mind games leading to disaster. So he doesn't say a word, but he watches closely. Carefully. Prepared for a consequence, whenever it may arise.

Hanging back, Marcel finally voices his thoughts when the women separate. "That looked an awful lot like angel crap right there. What's a vampire doing with that kinda power?"

One hand still resting absently on Hayley's shoulder, Elena turns around to meet his stare. "Awhile back, I was killed. Ironically enough, by Mikael, last time he was alive. I was human and there wasn't any vampire blood in my system. On the Other Side, I made a pact with a leviathan to get myself back here. To protect my friends from the Destroyer."

"_Leviathan_?" Marcel echoes incredulously. "As in _biblical sea monster_?"

Hayley asks, "What's a leviathan?"

Klaus answers, "Myth the elder witches tell. A form of demon that lurks in purgatory, striking deals with the ill fated supernaturals that cross over. Their goal is to keep lost souls from finding peace, because they feed off the energy of the Other Side."

The leviathan brought them back, Elena and Tatia, in one vessel, as one soul, and he finished off Mikael for them all. Together, the two managed to expel the demon from their body when he tried to overstay his welcome. Niklaus knows this because he was the one holding her while she fought him. He was the one that called her back. Helped her survive.

Only he knows the truth about just who came back from purgatory that night.

"For a bigger fish, it was willing to throw me back."

"Demonic stuff. Fabulous," Marcel deadpans.

"You used demon magic on me?" Hayley demands, not quite pissed yet, but ready to be.

"No. It's not like that."

"Marcel said himself," Klaus lilts. "Angelic, love."

"How do you get from demon to angel?"

"What are demons but the fallen?" the hybrid king retorts, brow rising, lips quirked a bit devilishly as his warm hand lands at the small of her back, meeting Hayley's level gaze from over her slender shoulder. "Can't say for sure, since it's never happened before, but I'd assume what little leftover essence the creature left inside her as host to its visit has become her own. Must be the light of Elena's soul that's turned the darkness to resemble its original form."

"Saint Elena," Marcel murmurs, intrigue in his low tone. "You weren't kidding."

"So you're saying the purity of her soul somehow salvaged a leviathan's leftover power into what it used to be before it got twisted in the fall?"

"One would suppose," he drawls playfully, chin dipping low, eyes casting up. Until the girl in question elbows him lightly in the ribs. "What, love? You've a better guess?"

But she doesn't, so she's at a loss for words to combat that. In a way, it's a relief when Hayley interrupts with a shrewd suddenly hopeful, "Could you put that weird gift to more violent use? Maybe say, taking down an immortal witch with a thing for head trips?"

"It's possible," she answers hesitantly, "but it all comes at a price. I don't think you'd want me using it against Esther. Unless there's utterly no other way, the cost wouldn't be worth it." She can't warn them any better than that, any more specific, because it's too hard to explain. And they wouldn't understand. They'd distrust her if she tried to make them see.

"Ah, well, that's alright, love." Klaus's fingers furl against her back, a quiet pointed message, making her suppress a shiver. Leaning in, voice low and intimate, bristle of his blond shadow scratching at the curve of her neck where her hair spills away. "I'll handle my mother."

"_We'll_ handle her," she counters, firmly with that familiar fire of resolution and challenge in her dark eyes, not just to him but to Hayley too. "We'll make it safe."


	6. Part V

_I'm down for whatever you need_…

In sunlight, aged white drapes drawn aside, Elena stands leaning against the carnelian wall, arms folded across herself and expression subdued, watching the hybrid king dig into the witch Marcel supplied them off the street. Splattered in blood, eyes shining, he looks bored. Brutal. After all the screaming she can take, teeth bitten down on the inside of her cheek, she shoves off and slides forward to intervene.

Warm crimson walls, polished oak, antique lace, patterned rugs, it's a corner drawing room on the second story they've closed themselves into, a window every three feet along the outer wall that overlooks the winding balcony. An easel slanted near one, grand piano against the built-in bookcases, musty old settees and Queen Ann wingback chairs, drink cart near the door, basin of washing water on the cherry wood accent table underneath an abstract Jackson Pollock. An incongruously quaint and civilized setting when the activities this room watches over are taken into account.

She came in uninvited while he worked, didn't say a word, wouldn't disturb him as he tried coaxing information out of the man on his knees, wrists shackled behind his back. If it was just Elena as she was, without Tatia's experience, without Tatia herself, she may have felt differently, but maybe not. Maybe she's seen so much, done so much, that by this point she knows there is justification for brutality, when circumstance calls for it. When someone you love depends on it. She's grim, gains no satisfaction out of hearing him scream, witnessing his agony, but this witch has chosen his side and they have theirs. Esther and her army of werewolf bitches have packed up and cleared out of Lafayette Cemetery. She's taken Elijah with her. They need to know where. This witch can tell them. It's as simple as that.

But that also means they can't waste this opportunity. They need him alive to be able to talk. So she's stands back and observes, letting Klaus do what he will, only so long as he's progressing. When he nears the line of what this man can take, she cuts quickly between them, catching him by the shoulder, wedging her body in the way of the maimed witch, making the hybrid back off. "Enough! That's _enough_. Stop."

Caught in the visceral rush, the blinded focus, he pushes back. "Don't interfere, Elena."

"_You're killing him_," she grits out, shoving hard enough to send him skidding backward a few good steps. "Niklaus, enough. Give it a rest."

"We have no time for sympathy!" he bites impatiently, raising the bloodied blade he'd been using on the man and pointing its sharp edge at her in emphasis, in aggravation. He's got red all over his face, slashes across his Adam's apple, soaking his grey stitched shirt to black. "Feel free to leave if you're too squeamish to do what needs done."

Irritated, she snaps, "If you kill him, that's all morning you've wasted." And then she turns, not wanting to carry on into a longer argument, demeanor softening deliberately, still sincerely. Kind and imploring, she lowers slowly to a crouch before the poor man, fingers ghosting gently across his matted hair, touching to his temple. Slick and discolored and barely alive. "I'm sorry," she's whispering. "So sorry." She takes his bloody swollen face in her hands, lifting it upwards, caressing soft touches to the mutilation, cradling him with care. It makes him look up wearily at her through his one usable eye, the other a gaping cavity of twisted shredded meat and wet red that has her concealing a grimace. His fingers are bent backwards from the knuckles, nails gone, and still he wouldn't talk. "Please stop this. I can't stand it. I don't want to see any more pain," she tells him, calm, quiet, heartfelt. Soothing and subconsciously ingratiating.

The tortured witch tries to bark out a laugh, spitting blood, choking on it. His chest rattles with the expelled breath. His throat whines. Wheezes. "You can't stop him."

Stroking healing fingers over him, she coaxes, "I can heal you. I can take the pain. He just needs to know what she's done to her son. Where they've gone. Just give him what he needs." She curves a hand below his jaw, cupping his chin, raising it when his head drops off its weight. "Please, Sebastian. Tell him what you know and let me end this."

When she leans in close as his body starts to tip, he lets his heavy head fall to her shoulder, ruined face in the sweet smelling silk of her hair, in the curve of her neck. Klaus is a wild animal, pacing the length of his cage in impatience, prowling restlessly for action. He looks brilliant and macabre and beautiful and awful. Their gazes catch over the witch's head as he passes through her periphery and the thoughts behind his crystalline eyes make her curious. Part of her knows, but she still yearns to find out, and she can't say why. Nostalgia perhaps.

"The old Mikaelson plantation," their victim whispers raggedly against the girl's collarbone, into her skin. Speaking on a shuddering death rattle sigh. "The one that burned."

"Thank you," Elena says, fingers curving as she clutches the back of his head, holding him to her when he slumps. "That helps."

"It's all I know," he claims, begging, crying, too tired to do it with more than just a whimper. "I swear that's all I know. I swear."

"I believe you, Sebastian. I believe you," she promises, fingers slipping from his short hair to the nape of his neck, murmuring compassionately, "Everything will be okay now. It's over now." Then snaps the essential vertebra with a small crunch of motion, too quick to sense it coming, swifter than he could feel it. Ending his pain.

Smothering the swell of guilt and despair and everything ugly that threatens to crash over her before it can gain a foothold, because she's had plenty of practice, Elena rises with a precise composing sigh and swivels around to find Klaus staring, an indecipherable attention to the cast of his stunning savage features. The alluring rough darkness of him that first drew Tatia's wolf and the fascinating twisted expressiveness that bound the girl's love. They don't speak, just fall still there an endless second, absorbing each other. The new and the old, the undiscovered and the painfully familiar, the shockingly complicated emotion attached.

He's only known the weight of one woman's eyes that could level him with just one glance. That could cut him open and spread his secrets out for her fingers to play in. All his weaknesses. He's only known a single creature that could look at him and make him believe a fierce righteous avenging angel has sent herself down to this tragic cesspool to save him from hell. And because he knows it's a lie, because he knows it's only going to ravage him, devastate, destroy, he pushes that shit away. Buries it under piles of ageless grief, resentment, fury, betrayal, disappointment, disbelief, bitterness, and defensiveness. Masks it with the lie that he doesn't care one way or the other anymore, slathered with wicked humor and a deceptively casual countenance.

And she's just as confused, if not more so.

The side doors slide apart, revealing an anxious Hayley, and the tension breaks. Morphs into another form. The pair disengage, his body angling away from her as she steps back and aside, taking a rag off the table and wiping her hands clean, becoming a stoic threesome, wrapping the buffer of denial and avoidance around each other. She tosses the rag to Klaus, where he's got his red hands sunk in the bowl, washing them off, scrubbing the blood from his skin. The stiffness in the lean strong set of his shoulders belies the bored disinterest of his attitude, but neither of the women are eager to notice.

In the heavy pregnant silence, Hayley prompts, "So, what now?"

Klaus pulls in a deciding breath. "Now, I clean myself up and pay my brothers a visit."

"At the plantation. _Your_ plantation house," Elena says. "Is it really necessary to mention how much of a trap this sounds like?"

"Of course it's a trap, love. Everything with my mother is a trap. I'm still going." He turns to face the two, leaning back against the table edge, ankles folding, eyes cutting to the hybrid girl. "And before you start, _no_, you're not coming with me."

Her arms cross. "I'm not sitting at home while you go after Elijah. You need me."

"Yes, little wolf, I need you out of the way. I have enough of a fight on my hands. If you're nearby when that happens, you are the first thing Esther will go after. I can't save Elijah if I'm busy protecting you."

"You don't have to—"

"This isn't the fight for you," he cuts off, clear and immovable. "You're vulnerable to Esther. You've already proven that."

"And she's different?" she challenges, nodding past him towards Elena.

His impatient sigh is full of exasperation. "Well, that's why you're _both_ staying put."

Hayley sucks in a sharp breath, ready to argue harder, but Elena doesn't say a word to this. She catches the woman's gaze behind Klaus's back and something in her eyes drives her quiet. After a torn heartbeat hesitating, she finally replies, "Fine. Whatever." Turns unhappily around on them, yanking the doors closed behind her, leaving the two alone again.

Once he's got his arms wiped down, the Original tugs out of his ruined shirt and swivels towards Elena, balling it up and tossing it aside. Sighing in frustration but also lazy indulgence. "What do you have to say, love? I know that look."

She just shakes her head, pressing her lips, and he ambles up to her with slow deliberation, bringing them uncomfortably close. Her body starts to ease into a backpedal before she catches it and forces herself to stand her ground, not even allowing her spine to arch backward from his invasive proximity. In a low raspy voice, she tells him, "Just be careful."

"Never am, my dear. It always works out."

Because of course he'd say that. Irritation flares, but it's mild, almost amused. _Fond_ maybe. She shifts her weight uneasily to the other foot, angling toward him as her chin tips up and her lashes shutter, one hand touching lightly to the taut warm skin of his side, rippled with muscle, familiar and yet so unsteadying, this thing that used to be the most natural in the world to her. To them both. "She'll throw everything she has at you to keep Elijah in her grip. She'll make you doubt what's real, what you feel, what you're so sure of." Her hand lands tentatively on his chest, finds the space above his heart, feeling it beat. "Don't let her in."

"Don't worry for _me_, love." Grinning wickedly, he curves long powerful fingers around her soft hips and gives them a sharp tug. She finds herself pressed suddenly flush against his body. The impact makes her arch, stomach to taut washboard abdomen, sensitive center crushed to the hardness of his half erection bound in his jeans, a quick intake of breath at the sensation. Husky lilting voice lowering provocatively as his lips lean towards her, he dismisses, "I know how to defend against my own mother."

Shakily, she says, "Let's hope so."

* * *

><p><em>"<em>_She killed me," she tells Stefan, tries to make him get it, but he just won't let the rage loose. And she needs the rage loose. She needs an outlet, some kind of release, because if she doesn't sink this sick burning viciousness into something, or someone, she thinks she might explode. And she knows she can't take it. "Stefan, she _killed_ me!"_

_"__To kill Alaric," he reasons, hands clutching her upper arms, keeping her at bay every time her new vampire body starts to surge. "To save us all."_

_"__I don't care. I don't _care_!"_

_"__Elena, you need to calm down."_

_"__No, no. By all means, Stefan," the blonde drawls, her crisp British accent thick with haughty sardonic disdain. They turn together to see her approach, head canted, expression on her pretty face laced with venom and boredom. "Let her go."_

_Still gripped in the Salvatore's restraining grasp, the girl takes one look at Rebekah and vamps out. Ramming against his hold, his strength, snarling towards her in the pure blinding haze of vengeance and hurt. "Get off of me! Let go! I'll kill you!" In her fury, she manages to knock her boyfriend aside, lunging at the Original. He snatches her back before she makes it, throwing her behind him once more, throwing her with such force that she sails back and smacks hard into the lockers. Rebounds with a whimper of pain._

_He stands over her, brow furrowed in sympathy, in remorse, standing guard nonetheless to make sure she doesn't get herself killed by the temperamental Mikaelson. She's going to push up and try again, keep ramming at the barrier between her and the focus of her hate and rage, but the next second Rebekah is behind him, snapping his neck with a blurred twister of motion, and Stefan goes down._

_"__There," she says, as the man's unconscious body hits the floor. "Nothing in your way now. What would you like to do to me?"_

_Seething, Elena shoves off the lockers, lurching towards her. Instead of evading or striking, she catches the girl head-on in a locked embrace, spinning around from the momentum of it, her teeth ripping deep into Elena's throat before the baby vamp can cause any damage herself. Fingers clenched in her chestnut hair, Rebekah pins her against her body when she tries to pull out of range, trapping her there. Drinking off her. Until the teenager's knees go weak and her pallor grows pale, eyes getting heavy, breath coming fast and uneven. Then the blonde lets go. Lets her stumble back and collide with the wall of lockers once more, half collapsed, too tired to even glare her hatred._

_"__Yes, Elena. Poor precious Elena. I killed you. I only wish you'd stayed dead. And wasn't it my right? Even if you hadn't had to die to deal with my mother's latest Frankenstein, I owed you death at the very least for what you've done to me. What your godforsaken Petrova face has caused my family. You killed my brother in the day, so I drove your truck off the bridge in the night. Seems merciful to me."_

_"__I didn't kill Klaus," she gasps, legs bent, barely up with the support of the wall. "I didn't want that. I tried to stop them."_

_"__Not hard enough," Rebekah sneers through gnashed teeth._

_"__And it wasn't my face that ruined your life, Rebekah. It wasn't my fault."_

_"__We were still a family before you got involved!" she exclaims, a sudden surprising swell of vehemence that startles even the blonde herself as it releases. Stepping back, reeling control in, she shutters her vulnerable expression with flat eyes and petty meanness, slicing into her wrist so blood flows. Drips to the grey linoleum. The school halls are empty, too quiet, it's just them, and Elena can hear her heartbeat thumping in her chest, making her mouth water, making her throat constrict as the hunger strengthens. As it stirs. Rebekah's smile is tight, humorless, cold. "Is this what you want most? More than revenge, more than love, more than pleasure, this is what you need now, isn't it? How does it feel, Saint Elena? To be a monster. Just. Like. Us." When she takes a step closer, the girl turns her head, expression pained, trying to resist the call of that acidic copper scent in the air, trying to bite back the thirst, but Rebekah keeps coming. "You think you're better than us, you think you can control it, be different, but you're not a wolf this time, bitch. You have no idea what it takes. You're _weak_. So as hard as you fight it, as much as you want to deny it, you'll fail. And just like the rest of us, you will give in."_

_Broken whispered, eyes squeezed shut, Elena admits, "I forgot you knew."_

_"__What?" she sneers again, looking down on her. "Who you really are? Yes, you would. Because I was never important, was I? _Tatia_. I never mattered."_

_"__That's not true." Shaking her head. Dragging out, "That was never true."_

_"__You tore my family apart. You took my brothers from me and pitted my father at Niklaus. You turned my mother against us." There is a wetness to her hurt hateful blue eyes, blue eyes like her brother's, so much like his. She keeps taking another step, and another step, closing in on Elena, allowing her no room. Until she is standing toe to toe, face to face, unbearably near. Crowding her against the lockers. She flattens one palm beside her head and leans in until they are close enough to kiss, until her cool caustic breath ghosts over Elena's lips, her blood so rich and so wet and the pressure is so bad. Torturous. "Take it, Elena. Be the monster."_

_She hadn't meant to egg this deep a truth out of Rebekah, emotions she hadn't even known she'd been feeling, that she blames Tatia for it all. For the sins of their parents._

_There is so much she wants to say, so many things she feels, remembers, longs to make the other girl understand. But the hunger is too loud, too strong, and the need is overpowering. Before she can try to say a word, Rebekah is winning. She's losing grip on restraint, giving in, reaching out, latching onto the Original's offered arm. Her teeth pierce soft flesh, her tongue laves at the torn edges, and hot wonderful blood spills into her mouth and down her raw sore burning throat, instantly assuaging the pain. The fingers of her free hand find a slim shoulder, pulling at it, mindless with the rush, with the joy, with the frenzy of never wanting it to stop. Her grip is clutching, kneading, sliding from the shoulder down, curved against the side her feminine frame, pressing into her back. Sounds work out of her throat, moans and groaning, sucking and gulps. Bruising fingers find her wrist, pluck it from the other girl's back, and her arm gets slammed back against the lockers, pinned beneath Rebekah's soft uncalloused touch. She finds her body pinned next, crushed between the blonde's and the metal, arching into her. Devouring. The hunger becomes half sated, gorging, bleeding into other passions, other desire. Arousal melts through her veins, oversensitive nerves afire, begging for more._

_It'd be confusing, if she thought about it._

_When they at last separate, it's because Rebekah places the flat of a hand to the center of Elena's chest and thrusts her back, fangs ripping from her skin, slamming into the lockers with an echoing crash. The impact rattles through her bones, but the girl's not feeling it, too pumped on Original blood, too high. Panting hard, her legs are wobbly, so she just slides down the wall to land with a thump on the floor, knees bent up to her chest, arms draped atop, head dropped back against the metal, dilated eyes looking up hazily at Rebekah._

_Equally flustered._

_To distract from that, she starts saying, "I didn't make Esther abandon you. I didn't make her betray you. She was a cold woman who used warmth and love as a weapon to control us." She tells the other girl, speaking rapid heartfelt patterns, "It's not my fault you didn't have the mother you wanted. The mother you _deserved_, Bekah. Because you _did_ deserve a mother that loved you unconditionally. You _do_ deserve that mother's love. Not a manipulative witch who makes you a monster and then condemns you for the same. A mother that can only love you for your death, not for who you are, for whatever you are."_

_Disdainfully, "I don't need a mother. I'm a grown woman. I've lived a thousand years."_

_"__And all you want is a mother's love. A man's devotion."_

_"__I may not have a mommy dearest or lapdogs panting after me like you do, darling, but at least I _have_ family left alive."_

_That stings, and it shows as the hit lands, flickering across Elena's face with fresh hurt and old wounds, but her voice is kind, compassionate, "I never wanted to be your enemy, Rebekah. There was a time I hoped we'd be sisters."_

_She's unimpressed. "Then you stole my brother from me and destroyed my family."_

_"__I was protecting the man I loved," Elena snaps, surging up off the floor. "I was protecting MY CHILD!"_

_"__While no one protected me!" Rebekah screams, an angry wounded shine to her blue eyes. Quieter, no less impactful, "No one."_

_Softening, Elena takes her by the shoulder, fighting forward when the Original tries to throw her off. She forces herself into her, wraps her arms around her against resistance, pulling her tight to her body, holding her pinned in a forceful embrace. "Shh, Bek. Shh." If she really wanted away from her, she'd snap her bones, blur away, too fast, too strong, but her efforts to shake Elena off are halfhearted. Pathetically translucent. She wants to be hugged. She wants to held. She wants all the hurts and resentments and invisibility she's felt since she was a child practically to be acknowledged. To be understood._

_She's the easiest target. It may not be true, but it is the easiest truth to cling to._

_"__I hate you," Rebekah curses, lips moving spitefully against her skin, against her shoulder, damp face buried in the brunette's hair. "You ruined everything."_

* * *

><p>Coming out onto the wraparound landing once Klaus is long gone, Elena catches Hayley predictably on her way out. "Not very good at doing what you're told, huh?" The hybrid stiffens, arms crossing defensively when she whirls around, looking up at the girl on the second story, eyebrow cocking like she's ready for a fight. But Elena just tips her head and grins back. "Good. Me neither." Vaulting over the rail, she lands gracefully on the stone at the bottom in a crouch. Joins the other brunette's side with a self-assured stride. Saying, "Now, I'm not sure what you were thinking, but I bet I've got a better idea."<p>

Hackles having quelled the second she realized this wasn't a lecture, realized she wasn't going to stand in her way, Hayley is guardedly receptive as she replies, "Let's hear it."

"Let Klaus combat Momma Mikaelson," she says. "I have faith in him being the biggest bad around town, but I have the feeling he's playing right into her hands. If I know Esther, this isn't a rescue attempt. This is the next brother's crucible."

"I'm not worried about Klaus."

"Yeah. He'll weather it, I know our boy, but he's not going to make progress. Not for Elijah."

"So what do you suggest?"

"Well, she's not gonna give him up easy. If we're gonna get anywhere near him, we're gonna need the mother of all leverage. Pun unintended."

The hybrid woman cocks an unimpressed brow, watching her cursed face with something like indifference. Deadpanning, "Still waiting for the point."

Elena laughs, slings a playfully friendly arm over the stoic hybrid's shoulders, saying huskily, "Sass is unnecessary. Come on, I'll show you."

And though the awe and gratitude of the cleansing has apparently worn off the other woman, she has the distinct feeling that this could be the start of a beautiful partnership. Friendship too. Either that, or they'll end up killing each other.


	7. Part VI

_I am woman_…

Elena and Hayley head first across the river to see Marcel. "We'll need backup," she'd said. They gathered what little resources they had at the moment, bringing a sparse but capable group together for what they needed to do.

Once everyone was present, the former king of New Orleans indulgently prompted, "Well then, what's your plan, little gypsy?"

And she'd answered, "While Klaus is busy beating his head against the wall, I say we go for the soft spot."

"Which is?"

Addressing the group as a whole, Elena had said, "The only child Mother Mikaelson values more than Elijah is her firstborn son. Having her children under her thumb is a want, but having her eldest on his leash is a need."

And so they schemed.

Teaming up with Marcel, Cami, Aiden, Josh, and Gia. Their mission? Straightforward, simple, hopefully clean. Take down Finn. Trade him for Elijah. That's the first step to any plan she may endeavor under. She promised to help them defeat Esther, to make the city safe for Hayley's infant to return, but she can't think about offensive assault when Elijah lingers within his mother's insidious grasp. Not when they can get him out.

Cami plays their lure, capitalizing on Finn's manipulative agenda, turning from the used to the user in an ironic twist Elena most of all appreciates, so many times the bait, the manipulated. When the trap at the church is set, Aiden plays his part and picks up the phone, turned traitor to the overlords that keep him oppressed, made their werewolf pet. Supplies misinformation under the guise of obedience, leading the witch in.

After word reaches Marcel about his little orphan's return, he hangs up his cell and looks to Elena from the rooftop the two stand on, waiting for the trap to cinch. She'd heard what one of his various informants scattered about the city had to say over the line, vampire hearing being what it is and all, but he still tells her, "Sorry, baby girl. Gotta go after Davina. Settle this whole Kol thing. You got things handled?"

"We're good here," she responds without blinking, already regretting the loss of his muscle, his skill, not letting it show. "Go get your girl."

"Good luck."

Before he's gone, she turns and snatches the sleeve of his jacket between two fingers as an afterthought, adding wryly, "If you can, catch the trickster for me, yeah?"

Brow winging, he checks, "Catch?"

"Alive."

So he throws her a roguish smirk, saying lightly, "No promises."

And then he's gone, and she's alone on the rooftop, watching for the shadowed figures across the street to approach the church's hallowed stone steps. Her nerves are jittering anxiously and her hands tremble in the cold October night air, restless and worried, but that's just Elena's fear, Elena's typical trepidation, the youngness of her shining through, despite all she's been through. Tatia's steel and experience keep her grounded, keep her feeling in control, like there's nothing much to be afraid of. Like she can handle it all and no one can hurt her more than she can take. That's true, they both know that, but it's what she can take that scares her. So she tells herself, _You've got this. You'll take down Finn. You'll help Elijah. Everything will work out._

It's a good plan.

Unfortunately, just shy of flawless success, Finn gets wise and Aiden is thrown through the church doors, his unconscious body skidding down the center aisle in dramatic fashion.

Things quickly start to fall apart from there.

With his boyfriend downed, Josh rushes to the wolf's side in panic, gets his neck snapped by telekinetic magic in the process, and he drops on Aiden. It's just the two girls doing tagteam with a scary powerful witch then. Gia is slammed high to the wall above the front worshipping altar, projectile candelabra tearing through her torso. Impaled too far off the ground where there is no purchase to find for freeing herself. Her scream brings Elena from the rooftop, not vaulting over the half wall to the street below and crossing but instead blurring along the narrow ledge to take a flying leap across the gap. She lands hard at hands and feet in a crouch on the church's steeple, slipping down the slanted roof for just a second before she latches on, friction from the rough sandpaper of the shingles giving her purchase. So she swings swiftly over the eaves and inside by the apex window, finding the cache she planted before the call was made, coming in from the top shadowed alcove of the cathedral overlook.

Hayley has gotten in a few knocks, but then he vices her heart in a nasty curse and it starts trying to rip itself out of her chest, ceasing any fight she may have had left. The hybrid woman stumbles back, coughing up spurts of blood, clutching the wound. She falls hard onto her knees, eyes wide as she chokes, as she tries to resist the brutal command of his black magic. A second before she's dead, an arrow looses, flies true, embedding in the Original's outstretched hand, cutting off his curse. The next arrow takes him in the calf, leg buckling from underneath him, third into his shoulder, its momentum spinning him around, knocking him back.

Elena tosses her crossbow aside and grabs the smooth polished wood of the overlook's rail, vaulting over the balustrade, feet hitting the church floor. She's striding stern up the center aisle towards where he falls, half on the blessed dais, dragging himself back. She only stops halfway to him for Hayley, taking the hybrid's arm, helping her up, guarded mystic eyes never leaving Finn. With an aggrieved yell, he yanks out the arrow piercing his bloody palm and tries to hold out the other to summon power, to throw it at her, but then Hayley is there, twisting his thumb aside, breaking his wrist. Taking grim pleasure in his scream as the rent flesh over her heart knits itself back together again.

From his other side, Cami appears, rushing out of her hiding spot behind the priest's pulpit and darting in, clanking a pair of spelled shackles around him, binding his power so that he can't sling any more dark magic tonight.

The three women stand circled around him there where he's felled across the wooden steps to the dais, towered and grave, various forms of necessity in their eyes. Such a sacred place here, sacrilegious place, where Hope was born and Hayley had her throat slit, thanks to his mother. Vindication and remorse and vindictiveness mingle between them, the only human left feeling torn for what she's helping with, feeling righteous but regretful in her choices, the two brunettes feeling nothing but victory.

"Hello again, Finn."

"The girl who killed me," he murmurs drolly, hostility a subdued resignation in him now. With a jagged humorless laugh, his own blood on his lips, on his hands, his eyes shining tired, the eldest son sighs. Falls back. "This must be fate."

* * *

><p><em>New York is an interesting place. And interesting things happen while she is there.<em>

_They happen in one night. One strange, exhilarating, pleasantly surprising night._

_Katherine has the cure, because Katherine killed her brother and stole the cure. Everybody and their brother want the cure, so everybody and their brother are on a hunt for the Petrova rogue. Her friends don't like Elena without emotion, without conscience, so Elena has been banished. Taken on a roadtrip to the Big Apple with Damon under the pretense of showing her the world, giving her a good time, but she knows the truth. She doesn't care. And she knows what he's doing here, in this city, knows he's playing her like his fun little puppet, looking for information on Katherine's whereabouts behind her back. Because he wants the cure to use on Elena. He doesn't care that Elena doesn't want to be cured. To be human. There's nothing left to be human for anymore. So she plays along, pretending obliviousness, because what they don't know is that Elena's hunting Katherine too._

_Tatia's never liked that doppelgänger. As much as she and Amara never got along on the Other Side, she never held the kind of contempt for her creator as she does for ugly Katerina. She watched her for centuries, has seen all the evil she'd done, with no fathomable excuse like family or loneliness or hurt and rage, however little justification those things offer, because she doesn't feel hurt or loneliness or the kind of love the rest of them have, all their reasons for all the damage they cause in their wake, lending not absolution but understanding. Katerina does not feel love, only jealousy, and has not protected a single person in her life. Evil things were done to her when she was young, though never innocent, and Tatia holds Niklaus responsible for his actions against her kin, blames him for the horrors he committed to Katerina Petrova, but she has no pity for her. Katerina is an ugly creature, full of hate and blame and envy and shallow desires, mad ambitions, in a way that Tatia cannot understand. She has no respect, no integrity, stands for nothing. And if she hadn't liked her before, she found her unforgivable as the wicked one went after her own, set against Elena right from the start, looking to hurt her for the sadistic giddy pleasure, for the goodness the girl possessed that Katerina disdained and the love and loyalty that goodness inspired. A vain jealous creature that would feel such cruel punishing hatred for her own shadow soul, tearing her apart instead of sticking together as they should have been able to do. As they were meant to._

_The wolf may have disdained Amara for her weakness, but their original would never have hurt one of her own daughters. And that is what they were, what they are, daughters, sisters, soldiers, salvation. They call it a curse, the curse of the Petrova face, cursed doppelgängers, but Tatia always saw it differently. She knew better. This is no curse, but a gift, a mercy from nature given to them so that they may be stronger, strong enough to survive. To thrive with the help of each other. Together, they are strength and power and faith._

_Reincarnations of the same soul. Only how can that be, they've all wondered? Because they aren't the same, not at all, not ever. But still twin flames, maybe meant to join._

_When she was first resurrected, had first merged with Tatia, Elena would often dream of facing herself. Looking into her own eyes, over her own face, and knowing it was someone else. Different, but together, like twins. Like something so much more intertwined than that. They would meet in the woods in the darkness in her mind, their mind, and they would gaze at one another, becoming familiar, until it was no longer weird, no longer disconcerting, but just a natural condition. When she began to accept the evolution she'd undergone, those nights in her mind grew to be less distinct, the divide between her and her twin less dimensional, losing the clear defined edges of corporeality. Eventually, there were no twins, but just one girl._

_Sometimes, she will think of herself as Elena, or as Tatia, two separate people wanting separate things, but then it never lasts long. Because even if they are not one mind, one heart, one soul, they are sisters, faithful to each other above all, respectful of the other's needs and those things one might love that her counterpart won't._

_Katerina never understood that. Too consumed by her own petty fixations, she never saw Elena as her sister, her shadow soul, someone to love and be loved by, to save and be saved by. She saw her as the enemy, as the better part of herself that got everything Katerina deserved, heartless Lilith believing herself the martyr._

_Whatever empathy and compassion Elena first felt for her dark distorted mirror image, what little she'd held onto over the years, that is dead and gone the second she rips Jeremy's throat out. Leaves him lying on the rock floor of Silas's cave, bleeding out, eyes open wide and horribly unseeing. That compassion turns to ash on her tongue, turns to sick ravaging hatred, dark and twisted vicious things. Ugliness to not match but surpass that of her predecessor. And she revels in that burning, that drive, because it gives her purpose. It lends her comfort, however hollow, tempered only barely by Tatia's knowledge that vengeance will bring her no form of healing. It might not heal her, but she believes it will give her closure. She knows it will because it has to. It must._

_Turning off her emotions hasn't changed those intentions, only muted them, set them aside for when it's convenient._

_Today, all she's looking for is a good time. The fact that Damon's unwittingly leading her to exactly what she needs to make progress, all in due stages, while under the foolish assumption that he's manipulating her _…_ well, icing._

_And then Rebekah shows up._

_They drink and dance and trade barbs, painting a picture of deep-seated disdain, even as they enjoy themselves immensely. Grudgingly. When the band comes on in the grunge club, she takes him by the lapels of his jacket and drags him out into the dancing crowd, feeling the Original little sister following after them. She jumps, spins, flips her hair, shaking out of her blazer and crying out in cheers with the rest of the revelers, letting everything go. And when she gets hungry, she finds an appetizing pixie blonde dancing nearby and sidles up, compelling her to keep quiet, fangs extending, lunging in without missing a beat in the sea of motion all around. It's a mild surprise to feel Rebekah's hand at her waist, resting lightly on her hip as a tether while she goes at the girl's throat on the other side, joining in. Feeding together._

_By the time she pulls back, Rebekah has moved on for a fresh neck and Damon is watching her closely. Warily. From the look on his face, he doesn't like the way they're sharing. Maybe it shouldn't, but this amuses Elena._

_It gives her an idea._

_At the end of the night, she convinces him to leave with her, to find a nice romantic spot to watch the sunrise, just the two of them. It doesn't take much, a word or two, a head tilt and the mere suggestion. He's putty really. As they walk out, she casts one last glance over a shoulder, back at Rebekah, her look clearly inviting. She might as well have winked._

_Three AM and she's seducing Damon on a New York rooftop, trying to get the address of Katherine's whereabouts out of his back pocket while he's distracted, sucking on her tongue. But he's not as gullible as she thought, because he pins her wrist, breaks the kiss, because she's not as sly as she thinks either. He sends her backward with a casual thrust of her wrist and Elena sighs, shifts her jaw, eyes scanning the skyline. Recalibrating. Before they can duke it out, or she can begin another manipulation, a blur of blonde hair and mischievous blue eyes cuts across the roof, snapping his neck from behind. Damon hits the cement at their feet and she looks up to lock gazes with Rebekah across his body._

_Hip cocked, hair flipped, "You need to work on your pickpocketing skills, Petrova."_

_Eyebrow quirked, Elena holds up the scrap of paper between two fingers and retorts, "What for? I've got myself a fantastic partner in crime."_

_"_ _Much fun as the evening has been, why should I want to team up with you? I don't really like you, if you'll recall."_

_Grinning, she says, "Liar. You love me."_

_To which the Original scoffs. "You're delusional."_

_"_ _You loved me like a sister as Tatia, wanted me to be your BFF as Elena. You've always longed for my approval. My attention. You still do. You just hate yourself for it and won't admit the truth."_

_In her customary dismissive superiority, cool British accent lending posh disdain, "If you're going to be talking nonsense like this, there is no way I'm helping you."_

_"_ _That's not what I'm suggesting. We'll help each other."_

_"_ _Why would we?"_

_"_ _Because we work well together, Bekah. You remember that," she drawls. Spins on her heel. Hops up onto the roof's brick ledge. "You want a human life, I want to get to the cure before the Salvatores can shove it down my unwilling throat, and who should be in possession of what we're both after but none other than the elusive Katherine Pierce?"_

_"_ _This is revenge for you," Rebekah guesses. "For what she did to your brother."_

_"_ _Maybe. Mostly I'm just enjoying myself." She plans to kill Katherine, nastily, but it can't be about that. She's not going to let it consume her. That was the whole point of shutting out her heartfelt feelings. It's the whole point of who she is now, this person, this void. "So, Mikaelson, what'll it be? Differences aside, a kickass alliance, enemies no more. Roadtrip?"_

_The blonde flashes a grin of anticipation, blue eyes narrowed. "Excellent idea."_

_Jumping down, the doppelgänger sashays towards her, going dark, going sharp. "Let's get something straight first. Katherine."_

_"_ _What about her?"_

_"_ _She's mine."_

_"_ _And the cure?"_

_Elena smiles. "All yours."_

_"_ _Marvelous," Rebekah lilts, clapping her hands together. Turning away._

_"_ _Oh, one last thing." Then she bends, digging the car keys out of Damon's jacket pocket, dangling them at the blonde when she pops back up. "Allow me to provide the ride."_

_The girls smirk victoriously at each other. It's a real bonding moment. Doesn't mean they won't kill each other tomorrow, but for the night, they're getting along splendidly._

_They don't blow town right away, continuing the partying they'd been doing on the streets into the predawn hours, into fancier places, finding bigger trouble. Dancing mindless in the wild neon lights of a rave, bodies crushed together, bouncing up and down, yelling out with the DJ and his dubstep, feeding off drugged out girls and pliable boys in the ultraviolet glow and rainbow strobes. Hustling barflies free of their wallets at pool, darts, arm wrestling. They feed and drink and play and tease and laugh off the aggressions and come-ons of the guys nearby. Throwing back tequila shots, drinking grown men under the table, getting up onto the bartop, stripping off her blazer. She dances for the cheers of the rowdy crowd, hair flipping wildly as she spins and shimmies and laughs, holds out a hand for Rebekah, who stands below the girl, watching the show with a small indulgent smirk. After a second's hesitation, the blonde takes the proffered hand, fingers sliding together, clasping tight, letting Elena pull her up swift onto the bar beside her. Hands skimming over the other girl's body as she snakes down against her and back up again to sift fingers through her soft blonde hair, dusting locks from her face and tucking them behind her ear, earning catcalls and whistles as she leans in, catching Rebekah's mouth in a quick stinging kiss, playful and grinning, surprising the Original sister._

_On the way out of that bar, patrons scattered, doors closed, black sky lightening to bruised blue in the distance, they're ambushed in the alley by a group of five. Brutish men, army jackets, worn boots, scruff along their strong jaws, hunting knifes hooked to their belts, guns tucked at the waistbands of their jeans. Hunters. They'd seen the performance, and then they'd seen the marks the girls left on several revelers, dazed and without memory. They try to corner them, thinking to take out a couple easy targets, a couple of pretty vampire girls._

_They get a big shock._

_Drenched in blood and guts, Elena slams the last man standing's head into the building so hard it indents into the brick. She licks her lips of blood and lets him drop, stepping over him in her high heels, meeting Rebekah's gaze across the alleyway as she picks gore from her perfect wavy gold locks, now matted with sticky red, but still perfect. At least to Elena, to the savage morbid thing inside of her, that thing who appreciates lifeblood, death, wild heated macabre. She's not herself, and yet she's more than she's ever been, closer to who she should have been. The wildling wolf of a millennia ago. The vampire of today, uninhibited by morals._

_"_ _Do you remember when you were screwing Damon?" she asks the blonde, her tone lightly interested and her grin breathless from battle. The rush. "When I was jealous of you for it and you were jealous of me because he was in love with me and you couldn't compare."_

_"_ _That's conceited," Rebekah drawls in deadpan, unperturbed by the offhand insult._

_Elena brushes it off with a wave of her red hand. "Anyway, it's good, isn't it? Not letting a man put us at each other's throats. It's so much better being friends."_

_"_ _We are not friends."_

_"_ _Yes, we are."_

_"_ _We will never be friends, Elena Gilbert. I cannot stand you."_

_"_ _Liar," is all Elena says, a slow sensual smile on her bloodied lips, hazel eyes glimmering with knowing amusement, with smug satisfaction. She spins in the middle of that lingering look and struts off, leaving Rebekah to follow, eyes rolling with an exasperated sigh._

_They head off into the dawn, looking for a place to clean up. Ending up at a five-star hotel for a little rest before they hit the road. They book a room and Elena slides the keycard from the concierge's grasp with teasingly caressing fingers and a flirty smile, leading the blonde onto the elevator. The lobby is deserted, but it takes compulsion to keep the man from calling the cops at the state they're in. As the elevator doors close and the lift starts rising, she leans back against the brass rail in the wall and catches Rebekah's eye with a tilt of her head and a certain devilish gleam in her dark gypsy stare._

_"_ _What?"_

_Elena catches her bottom lip between her teeth with a husky little laugh. "Nothing."_

_"_ _So where is Katherine hiding out?"_

_"_ _Somewhere in Pennsylvania."_

_"_ _You have to be joking."_

_"_ _That's what I thought. But apparently Damon's contact has spotted the doppelgänger near a Podunk town called Willoughby. And since I've never stepped foot in Pennsylvania in all my life, common sense says Katherine."_

_The elevator dings and the doors slide open on the 77th floor. As she starts to step off, she's saying, "I can't imagine what that conniving whore would be doing in—"_

_"_ _Rebekah," Elena interrupts, her voice clear and confident, purposeful and provocative, fingers curving around the blonde's arm when she gives her a sudden tug that has her spun and brought back onto the elevator, their bodies lightly colliding. Free hand coming up, she is quick to catch the Original little sister's face, fingers slipping into her hair, palm to her cheek, thumb hooked under her jaw. As she's leaning in, she says, "I don't wanna talk about Katherine anymore tonight, okay? I just wanna enjoy myself."_

_And then she's kissing her. Because she can, because she wants to, because what the hell, why not, it's an easy way to feel good. To forget her problems. Lips pressed softly but firmly, her tongue slipping in, stroking wetly into the heat of Rebekah's mouth. This girl that she had thought of as a little sister, in another life, as another person, this woman she burned with hate for as a teenage victim, a murdered immortal. And after hate had come regret, understanding, yearning. She'd loved her once, for a long time, and then she loved her again, even though she knew Rebekah still despised her. But that was three incarnations ago, and now she's neither one of those people, but someone new, someone empty, a vampire girl who just doesn't care, who just wants to have fun. So she kisses her, slow at first, and then roughly, bodies pressing together as she shoves her back into the shimmering brass wall, mild interest building as they go to deepen into vehemence as her nerves stir and desire wakes._

_Remembering passion._

_For something new. For anything that doesn't hurt._

_In the heady rush that blooms, she finds herself feeling fervent. Only mildly so, but still it's something, a frisson of sensation to chase. The perpetual boredom, the apathetic coolness falls away for a bit, and she grows invested in the moment in a way she hasn't felt since she burned her house down. Since she lost herself._

_"_ _It's technically morning," Rebekah replies, when their kiss pulls apart, just to be difficult. And then, "What are you doing?"  
><em>

_Raspy voice whispered, Elena replies, "Giving you my attention."_

_"Sure you know what you're doing?"_

_"_ _Do you care?" she archly retorts._

_After a moment, huskily stern, "Absolutely not." And then she takes Elena by the nape of the neck and kisses her first this time, fisting in chestnut tresses, pushing herself off the wall and forcing the doppelgänger out into the long wide corridor. The elevator shuts behind them as they stagger blindly down the hall, heels sinking into the plush carpet, a tangle of teeth and lips and tongues and twisting fingers. They spin and stumble and a palm low to her stomach thrusts Elena backward, smacking her into somebody's door so hard she has to wince with a quick intake of air. "You think you're winding me around your finger like you've done to my brothers and the Salvatores and every other foolish man you ever set eyes on. That's not what is happening here."_

_"_ _Of course not," she laughs, head thrown back, Rebekah's tongue stroking up the column of her throat as she licks hunter's blood from her caramel flesh. She wedges a knee high between them and knocks the blonde back when she's done, pushing herself from the door, eyes glinting red with lust and hunger._

_Blurring across the breadth of the corridor, she slams the blonde back, fangs finding the softness of her throat, sinking in, a warm rich gush of blood flooding to her tongue. Feels deft fingers working the oversized buttons of her blazer, peeling it apart, shucking it impatiently down her arms, leaving it where it falls as they shuffle together down the hall. When she pulls from Rebekah's throat, she smears red up her jawline, across her lips, spreading it inside when their mouths meet again. Breathing each other in. Touching each other with grazing mapping hands and experimental ministrations._

_Once they round the corner, Rebekah pushes her backward into an accent table, one hand curved under her thigh, lifting her up just a little against her, sliding her back onto the wood. Vase of roses clattering to the floor, she unzips her boots one by one, tugging them off without losing her lips. Fingers unsnapping the fastens of her low slung jeans, levering them down her hips and thighs and past the knees, pulling away to yank them from her ankles and toss aside. She takes her face, coming back in for another kiss, that sloppy openmouthed entanglement, but Elena puts out her palms, barring her advance, shoving lightly at her. Sliding off, she rips open the blonde's blouse, tearing away the scraps, knees dipping as her mouth finds the swell of one pale smooth breast above the lace hem of her bra. Cerulean like her eyes._

_"_ _Never done this before," she's muttering breathily, distractedly, mouth trailing down from the blonde's collarbone to her ribcage to the soft flesh of her stomach and over her hip. Pausing with a devilish glance upwards, down on her knees on the plush corridor carpet, hooking just her fingertips in the waistband of her pants. Lips lingering right there, centimeters off the flesh and whispering playfully, "But I bet I'll figure it out."_

_Hot breath raising goosebumps along Rebekah's skin, she finds her eyes falling shut and her lips falling apart on a soundless plea, no way in hell she'd ever ask Elena for that. Out loud at least. The way her body arches, yearning imperceptibly closer, that says it all._

_"_ _Still claiming you don't like me?"_

_Breathlessly, blindly, without venom, she returns heavily, "Shut up, Elena."_

_The doppelgänger laughs. Unfastens her pants, pulls them down her long lithe legs, letting Rebekah step out of them. Left in her bra and panties, Elena only in her red pair of boyshorts and tank top, both covered in blood and panting, they make quite a sight in the hotel hallway. Fingers leaving imprints on the blonde's hips, bracketing her hold, she's shameless and free, unabashed and worriless, leaning in, running her tongue up the curving core of the other girl in one slow stroke that has Rebekah shuddering, a soft gasp of surprise leaving her as her eyes snap open at the sudden onslaught of sensation. Such intensity from such a simplistic motion. The touch is muffled by the thin fabric between them, complicated, no less acute. The lace is already damp, overheated, her bundle of nerves taut and throbbing. Waiting. As women do, like they must, their roles biologically innately passive. It's how they're programmed, how the body is designed, the instincts born. But they don't have to be._

_They can be bold. They can take what they want, make it what they will, give their bodies torture and release without losing pieces of themselves. Being a vampire taught Elena that. Being a wolf taught Tatia._

_With an impatient growl, or the faint purring sound that reverberates from her chest into her throat that resembles it, Rebekah grips her shoulder, pulls the girl upright, pushing back. They crash into the accent table once more, broken glass from the vase cutting at her bare feet, thorns off the roses pricking in, edge of the table bruising the small of her spine as she bends backward over it, skin to skin with the Original little sister, kissing hungrily. Madly. Violently. She twists fingers in Elena's chestnut hair and hoists her off the floor, calves cinching around Rebekah's thighs, bodies undulating against each other with breathless frenzy. They kiss and kiss and kiss, sloppy and wet and intense, mouths sliding and mingling spit and blood and lust. Sharing air. She slides fingers down the flat of the blonde's stomach between them, dips them beneath the rim of her cerulean panties, finding wet heat, stoking the fire in her bound nerves, and the fist in her dark hair tightens painfully, a gasping reflex._

_Rebekah yanks the tank top hurriedly over Elena's head, dropping it forgotten to the roses, her body shivering tensely at the buildup of Elena's fingers twisting and rubbing and pinching, spasms wracking with each sharp stroke, each deep caress, mouth falling to the darker girl's throat, fangs piercing in, swallowing deep. When she comes undone, body quaking violently, composure rent to pieces, unraveling against Elena with a shuddering cry, her teeth recede and the broken skin of the girl's neck knits together again. Flawless in seconds._

_With another one of those raspy cascading laughs of hers, Elena puts her arm around the Original sister's waist and pulls her fingers out of her panties, sliding off the table and heading druggedly down the massacred corridor. She grabs only her blazer off the floor and they keep going until they find their room number brocaded into the wall, keycard out of her pocket used to unlock the door, the two girls stumbling laughingly into the hotel suite. Kicking the door shut with her sole, she slumps to lean against it, hazy sultry smile on her red lips, dark lashes hooding her eyes as she watches the blonde unhook the clasp of her bra and drop it to the rich ivory carpet, shimmying out of her lace panties, padding absently towards the washroom. Just before she gets there, the doppelgänger blurs forward, appearing in her path._

_"_ _Shower," Rebekah starts to say, but Elena's lips capture her quiet._

_They walk backwards a bit before her palm flattens to the blonde's abdomen, one good thrust sending her flying, crashing onto the grand king bed by the window, NYC skyline lights in the glittering rising sun, all oranges and blues and brilliant white prism reflections. But as soon as she lands with a bounce, Rebekah is rebounding, a blur of movement taking her off, moving a wide circle around the brunette, catching her wrist and twirling her sideways like they're dancing. They end up crushed together, Elena's hand fallen to her shoulder, her other grasping at Rebekah's hip. She trails her long graceful fingers slowly down from the shoulder over the ridge of her collarbone and downward, tips grazing the upper swell of her breast as her palm cups under its heaviness, taking it full in her grasp, fingers brushing the nipple to make her gasp, make her arch, body bucking reflexively against the gypsy girl. Her nails dig into the hip, adding a little pain, sharpening the pleasure, and she walks her backward again, this time turning the blonde before they hit the wall, one hand between her shoulder blades bending her forward over another antique accent table._

_Gasping in air at the roughness, at the dizzy anticipation, Rebekah sweeps an arm across the polished tabletop, sweeping another vase and a crystal dish aside, white flowers and mints scattering across the floor. Elena crushes in against her from behind, hips pressed to the curve of her ass, breasts flattened to her back, arms snaking around her waist, reaching down to slip two fingers inside of her, palm grinding down against her clitoris so hard it makes Rebekah cry out again, guttural and gripped, Elena's fangs sliding back into her throat. Drinking deep. And as she drinks, growl vibrating in her throat, eyes reddened with the monster, the hunger, the violence, she fucks her with her fingers, her palm, her wrist flicking sharp hard motions, slender strong fingers furling inside as the blonde's inner walls clench and flutter around her. Manipulating the sensations of her body, what she feels, what she gets, such empowerment in that and such strange cruelness. It gives her a rush, something beyond the lust and the desire, something like the dark terrifying thrill she gets from meanness, from control, that sick thrill within the void of who she is now. She rubs against the other girl, Rebekah's backside bucking back into her as the throbbing she feels under her hand echoes her own taut torturous reaction, hot and swollen and aching for satisfaction. And the hunger, the feeding, the yearning, it never ends and it never sates. Insatiable, she feeds and fucks, pulling in Rebekah's blood, winding up Rebekah's body into helpless feverish tension, pained pleasure, a quivering puddle of begging, lost amidst that rushing animal need._

_The lovelorn Original little sister comes apart with volatile orgasm twice over by Elena's committed touch, fist slamming into the wall overhead when she comes, denting the plaster, cracking the mirror hung nearby merely by the reverberation of the hit. As tightly wound as she's gotten, she loosens with a brutal spasming jerk, gasping out, head falling forward to thunk against the tabletop as her body begins going limp._

_Fangs retracting, Elena lifts her head and stumbles back, swiping fresh blood from her lips as she catches her breath, red eyes becoming hazel again, rolling skyward, dizzy and drunken. She finds herself laughing throatily, hand smoothing across her stomach as she shakes with it, still so craving, still so aching. Frenzied._

_If she was who she used to be, if she had her conscience, she'd be scaring herself._

_"_ _I suppose I can see what had my brothers so crazy for you," Rebekah murmurs heavily as she regains her strength in the comedown, relaxed and warm like melted wax, glowing nicely. "You do know how to use your wiles."_

_"_ _Wiles?" the girl echoes incredulously, feigning affronted. "I know how to use my fingers. That's all," she says, lifting the hand that'd been inside the blonde and sliding those wet digits deliberately into her mouth, smile taunting and eyes smoky. Haunting._

_Rebekah groans. "You're insufferable." But her insides are churning again, desire in her eyes and an inexplicable giddiness lurking beneath the surface of her armor, her bravado, reminding Elena just how desperate for approval she is. Approval, appreciation, anything to banish the loneliness that consumes her. It'd be all too easy to use against her, but she has no need for that now. Not yet._

_When she draws those marked fingers out, sucked clean of the blonde's juices, she crooks them in a playful invitation, urging her closer. She backpedals in slow swaggering steps when Rebekah moves forward, following after her, closing the gap between the girls. They meet just shy of the edge of the mattress and take each other's faces in their hands, mouths colliding in an open wet embrace. Falling into bed together, drunk on blood and booze, hazy on pleasure. She lands on her back beneath her with a laughing bounce, dark wavy hair splaying around them as they crawl up the fluffy white bedspread, leaving red in their wake like the deep blood drops that had fallen onto the white petals of the discarded flowers. On her hands and knees, Rebekah climbs Elena's body, her mouth alighting in soft kisses across the surface of her by every angle, traversing planes and valleys and peaks, mapping the contours with her tongue and blunt teeth, licking and lightly biting._

_Delving fingers deep into her silken fair hair, Elena leans her head back into the pillow and closes her eyes, breathing deeply between hitches, letting her lover do as she will. She thinks of Niklaus and what his blue eyes would look like if he saw this, if they'd be glittering with rich amusement and his smile teasing, heated with lust at the sight, or hurt perhaps. She thinks the humor would be strongest. The desire seconded. She likes that, grin curving at her lips as her face cranes skyward, imagining his face. Imagining Elijah. It's funny, thinking about the girl's brothers as her lips leave marks across Elena's body, claiming her for just this single moment. She's had three of the five Mikaelson siblings now. Three indomitable Mikaelsons inside her. The most feared creatures that walk this planet. She's made them all bend beneath her touch, made them fall apart, unraveling at her will. Doesn't that make her something?_

_Perhaps she'd go after Kol next, if she hadn't killed him._

_And what a waste, she thinks now. Jeremy's dead anyway. Killing Kol was pointless._

_"_ _What are you thinking about?"_

_"_ _You as human," Elena mutters without missing a beat, breathy and distracted._

_Movements hitching in surprise, unbalanced, Rebekah asks, "Yes?"_

_The insecure hope in her voice makes the doppelgänger laugh. She raises an arm and her palm slaps against the polished oak headboard, fingers squeezing on the edge, holding tight as her back arches tautly beneath the blonde's touch, knuckles bent and brushing against her core through silk panties. Roughly, she says, "Settling down to live a nice normal life, marrying off to some loser, finding a picket fence. It sounds unbearably boring."_

_"_ _It's what I want," the Original implores, not sure what she's asking for._

_"_ _To make your brothers watch you wither and die? Really? Or is it just the picture that has you so desperate for the cure?"_

_"_ _The picture?"_

_"_ _The package," Elena clarifies. "Husband, two kids, stable home that you never have to run from or burn down. Somebody to love you for as long as you live. Somebody to love as wholly as you can only ever love your own child. That's what you want. Humanity? No. It's a cover. It's a catchall. But that isn't how things work out. I was human. I had that life. Look how that turned out."_

_"_ _Don't depress me, Elena. I'm in a good mood," she drawls acerbically, shaking off any dark thoughts she tries to summon._

_With her free hand, the girl lifts it from her stomach to trace fingers through yellow hair, tucking it behind her ear, following the falling strands down her arm, touch gentle and electric as it dances downward. Makes her shiver. When it comes back up, she lays her thumb to a pink lower lip and drags to the chin, blue eyes she's loved for centuries peering up pleadingly at her, wanting her to be someone she's not anymore, wanting her to be salvation. Pityingly, she says, "We'll get you your cure, Bekah. I just won't promise how you'll like it."_

_Rebekah rips open the band of her bra, crimson contrasting richly against the caramel of her European skin, pieces of it falling apart, revealing the rise and fall of her modest breasts, flushed and hardened at the rose nipple. Rougher now, more focused, almost punishingly, she leans over her and sinks down, catching one breast between her lips, tongue laving skillfully, sucking at her in a way that has Elena bucking sharply up into her, oak cracking under her fisted fingers, exclaiming some unintelligible consonant. Rebekah takes the other in her hand and massages, pressing down into it, pinching at the nipple, tugging the flesh. She quivers and shakes and breathes hard, hips jutting off the mattress against the other girl, eyes falling shut. Fingers skimming down her body, wrenching off her panties, mouth leaving a messy path of glistening saliva from the breast down._

_"_ _This is fun," the doppelgänger tells her, talking to distract herself, to control herself, masking how close she is to a powerless precipice. "You know, we're kinda going rogue, teaming up because no one would ever expect that, splitting off, going behind their backs in a race for the cure. It's very bad of us. We're kinda like renegades."_

_"__Renegades. Really, Elena? Does this make your sheltered little good girl heart feel cool?" She ducks down, licking a snaking path across her arched pelvis as the British lilt becomes familiarly mocking. "Is that what _this_ is too?"_

_Elena just laughs. "No, this is me drunk. You too. Don't deny it."_

_"__Very drunk," is all Rebekah says. She dips further down for just a split second, just a brief teasing taste, lips closing around that swollen bundle of nerves, flat of her tongue pressing in, teeth clamping just so. The girl cries out, bucking hard, her upper half straining upward as she grits out a ragged yell, limbs both stiff and limp, body quaking violently within the bounds of resistance and desperation. But as swift and gut-wrenching as it hits, she's letting go, rising up to find Elena's mouth, bruising her lips with a brutal vampire kiss. Fangs prick at the soft skin until blood wells up and spills forth, girls exchanging gasps into each other's mouths as their bodies vibrate with the fresh scent of it hitting the air, bodies humming. Lips moving against Elena's own, brow rested to her forehead, she whispers, "Good girl Elena, wholesome Elena, pure Elena, poor thing, you've been tainted. You're not pure anymore. You're dirty. Touched. Body and soul. Blood on your hands, blood between your legs. And you called _me_ easy."_

_"_ _The girl you're talking about no longer exists," she returns, giving back as good as she gets as her fingers curve over the nape of Rebekah's neck and hold her close, long legs locking about her waist, pulling her down against her flush, a controlling grip. Voice harsher than she meant it to be, bitterness belying her apathy, "Kiss her goodbye. She's dead and gone."_

_In the morning, or rather later that morning, after sex and sleep and room service, each girl is thoroughly gorged and feeling good about one another. Azure classic Camaro waiting for them at the curb, they climb in and drive off, tossing her phone out of the car after hearing how pissed Damon is about being left behind. Leaving New York City in the dust._

_When they find Katherine, they'll get the cure for Rebekah and the Original will help her pay the bitch back for her brother's death. Real quality teamwork._

_Who needs overbearing boys anyway?_

* * *

><p>Finn gets trussed up and delivered to the Mikaelson French Quarter compound, under guard by Hayley and Gia, and Elena takes a detour as they leave the church, setting off to find Niklaus before he does anything too rash, now that the game has changed. It's not easy finding him but with a little help from a Quarter witch and a lot of help from her nose when magic only takes her so far, she comes upon him in the bayou. He's standing toe to toe with a broad shouldered older man by a small campfire, moss hanging from the ancient trees, casting spooky shadows.<p>

When she gets close enough to see the stranger's face in the darkness, a gasp expels from her lungs like a punch to the gut, utterly floored. She comes to a sharp stop. Abruptly, she's all Tatia. "_Ansel_?!"

"Tatiana," he breathes out, eyes going past Klaus to stutter onto her face. As shocked with disbelief and joy as she is. "How can this be?"

Suddenly running, she sprints up, cutting between the men, throwing her arms around him in a heartfelt hug, colliding breathlessly in her startled excitement. He holds her about the waist, her feet inches off the ground, her nose buried in his neck with a relieved smile. Uncomplicated happiness. "I thought you were gone forever when the Other Side was destroyed."

Niklaus is unreadable. Stony. Suspicious. Characteristically guarded as he watches them. "You two know each other." Statement, with a thousand questions underlain, ready and braced for betrayal of some sort.

Pulling away from Ansel, she half turns to meet the hybrid's mistrustful stare. Ignoring the pangs of worry, hurt, dread, that inkling she gets from his strangeness, Elena admits, "Ansel was my alpha."

"Your—"

"No, Nik," she interrupts, hurried to it, fervent at it, because she sees what he's thinking. "Not when we knew each other. Not while we lived. I didn't know he was your father until we met again in purgatory."

"It's true, Niklaus," the werewolf alpha backs her up. "I never told my wolves."

Hand dropping off Ansel's shoulder as she steps toward Klaus, she sees the still strong doubt in his cold eyes, the protective hesitation, and she elaborates, "I thought he would hate me for what I'd done to our pack. Mikael had struck him down days before the war had truly begun. Before I stood against my own pack for you. Before I slaughtered them. But I knew he would've seen it all from the Other Side and would know my betrayal. When he told me why he couldn't, how he regretted the fate of our people but didn't fault me for protecting you when he wasn't able to, I realized who he was. Who _you_ were to him."

She'd told him once, maybe twice, that there is so much they don't know about each other. Not anymore. Not now. Not as these new people they have become.


	8. Part VII

_You can do what no one else can_…

He sends her away, makes her assume they want time alone without actually saying, and she almost follows along. She almost goes, but something makes her turn back. The hunting blade hanging loosely from his curved fingers, a dangerous stance, and Elena yells, "_No_!" Panicked. Lurching forward. Blurring between them, throwing her arms out, back pressed to Ansel's chest, Klaus's blade stopping an inch from her throat.

Pulling back with a frustrated sigh, he looks away, clenched jaw shifting, eyes refocusing. Voice cold, completely shutdown, "Move out of the way, Elena."

"You don't have to do this," she argues.

"He knows about Hope."

There is a shine in his blue eyes, torment there in the firelight, and she feels Ansel's rough hands touch gently to her splayed arms in comforting calm. "He loves you, Nik. He would never betray his kin."

"Do you think I want this, Elena?" he snaps, suddenly vehement, tip of the machete grazing the soft skin of her throat before it falls away. "You think I don't desperately want to trust him? It's too much. I can't afford to."

She's steadfast and shakily strong. "He loves you."

Head shaking, his gaze goes past her shoulder to the older man's stare and back. Half turn, another sigh, breathing in his dilemma. Gruffly, "I can't risk this. I can't risk my child."

"But me?" she softly challenges, after a second of watching him, of the pregnant quiet and crackling fire between them three. Realization taking hold of her, she presses, "You're right, Nik. It's a lot to trust the truth with. It's a lot to lose. But I know it. You risk her for me."

Mutinously, jaw tight, "You're not the same."

Tearfully, completely raw, she retorts, "But I am. We both love you. We both would suffer before we'd ever endanger Hope." Then, when he doesn't speak, when he won't look back to her, to them, her arms spread wide still, her body between his blade and his father, her alpha. Helplessly pleading. Voice so quiet, she wants to know, "Do you even still love me?" And every inch of it is Tatia. Undeniably the wolf girl who lived a thousand years ago.

The question is so unexpected, so seemingly irrelevant, he turns back towards her in harsh guarded surprise, taken aback.

Rough fingers on her arms tighten in warning, worried for her, wary of the hybrid. "Tatiana," his father murmurs below his breath.

"Do you?" she demands, chin lifting, tone gaining strength, finding conviction. "_Can_ you?" She's breaking every rule they have, obliterating that careful balance they constructed together, that feigned obliviousness in order to coexist. She's ruining it all, calling him out, crossing a line. A line that might never be uncrossed. "Niklaus, can you even tell anymore? Or is it just because you think that you should? Has it been so long that all you remember is the endless tragedy that ever came out of loving each other? Because believe me, I know how much the cost we've both paid outweighs the little worth it had."

Distracted, dazed, he whispers weakly, "Don't say that."

Her laugh is miserable, her smile watery. "You know it's true. You've been telling yourself that for a thousand years. Cursing Petrovas for making you love me, for the pain it's caused you, _needing_ to hate me, blaming me for giving up on you, for betraying you to the coven."

"She saved your life that night, Niklaus." Ansel's fingers are tight and protective on her skin, but his gruff voice is low and cautious. Authoritative. "Sacrificed herself so that you would live. You can't blame her for that."

_Of course he can_, she thinks with another watery wry laugh, just as Klaus spins back around, bellowing furiously, "_Of course I can_!" Vehemence lashing out abruptly in a brief brilliant flash of white hot vulnerable truth, pulling back quick a second later, regretting the lapse. To the wolf, he tells him, "I never wanted her to die for me." Then his resentful gaze lowers to focus on Elena. "You shouldn't have stopped fighting. We could've—"

"No, Nik. We couldn't have," she sadly disagrees, sympathetic and wistful but still so certain. And then her remorse morphs to censure. "You don't have to let those habits rule you today. You can make a different choice."

But she can already see that she hasn't convinced him. That she wasted breath. "I will not put my daughter's life in the hands of a man who has done nothing to earn such faith from me. Esther has brought him here to use against us. To let him live would be tantamount to handing her Hope." And then he comes around to stand face to face, toe to toe, and he raises the blade at the man and woman. "Do not stand in my way, Elena. You will not stop me."

Burning raw with emotion, ready for a fight, her wet eyes narrow, jaw shifting, and she tips her head just a notch. Challenges, "I can slow you down." Then, "Ansel—"

His grasp on her squeezes once, and then it's gone, and his breath on the back of her neck is the kiss of a ghost when he somberly declares, "I won't run, wolfling."

_So that's it_, she thinks. Resignation shudders over her. Misery sweeps back in like an old familiar friend, a friend she hates but can't seem to escape. "Alright," she sighs, dark hazel eyes shutting in defeat, in regret. Arms slowly dropping.

Tears in his blue stare but expression merciless, Klaus orders, "Step aside, Elena."

And she does. Painfully, heartbrokenly, futilely imploring. She understands his reasons but she thinks they're crap. She thinks this is so unfair. But he's probably right. Esther wouldn't have resurrected Ansel if she wasn't positive she could use him. Even though Elena knows that he would never willingly harm his kin, his blood, his loves, because Tatia knows it, she can't say for sure Niklaus is wrong. She can't say Esther won't _make_ him betray them. That giving into his presence in their lives could be exactly how they let the witch win.

But it still sucks. On so many levels, she can't even explain, it just so badly sucks.

The girl is ten paces from the campfire light, shadows dancing from the flicker of the flames, when she hears the autumn foliage crunch and shiver under Klaus's feet as they shift forward. He moves to strike. With a wince, a bracing cringe, shudder of revulsion and hurt and reluctance electric and sharp inside of her, she blurs back. Drives her fist into Ansel's chest, her fingers lean and long and supernaturally strong, her fingers around his beating heart. Slick and warm and so very wrong. He grunts at the intrusion, breath stolen, features going slack from the instant recoil of shock, dropping down. Elena goes with him, not letting him fall alone.

"Rest in peace, my old friend."

Stunned, Klaus gasps out, surging against her after the second of disbelief catches up to him, catching the man together with her, helping her lower him to the ground. Sinking to their knees. Holding him together between them, fingers crushing the organ irreparably in the gaping cavity, letting go when he stops breathing, pulling solemnly free. Her hand red and wet and warm from the inside of him. Hot tears streak her cheeks, pooling in the edges of her mouth, slipping over the curve of her jaw. Staining her neck. It's not fair. She cries because it's not fair, because she lost this man twice, three times now, a longtime companion, longer than is humanly imaginable. She was already grown by the time they met, by the time he found her, took her into his pack, but he was the closest thing to a good father the girl had ever known until she became Elena. _Alpha_. So much more than father, leader, protector, _pack_. And then she looks at Niko's face and it hurts all that much worse when she takes on his pain too.

Eyes wide, wet, wounded, bewildered, he looks to Elena over the corpse of his sire and asks, "Why would you do that?"

She feels the weight of his attention, his eyes searching her stained face, but she can't seem to look away from Ansel. Her expression tries to crumple but she keeps it smooth, not cold but just numb, gone hard. Achingly brittle, her raspy voice stays almost impassive when she replies, "Mikael is the only father you deserve to murder."

Fingers slick with Ansel's blood, when he clasps her hand, she furls around his, grasping it fiercely to hers. Finding a tether. Something to pull her back in before a storm sweeps her out. She turns her head away from his sight, wiping the wetness fallen down her cheeks, lips apart, breathing resolvedly in against a shudder. His grip tightens, tries to pull her close, and she lays a hand to his shoulder, squeezing in message.

"C'mon," she says, swallowing the pain. "Let's go bring Elijah home." She stands, letting go of Ansel, bloody touch slipping away from Klaus as she walks off into the dark.

* * *

><p><em>He is the exception to everything. He is <em>always_ her exception._

_The first move Klaus makes to get his family's coffins from Stefan is going after Jeremy. Compelled, he takes his hunter's ring off and steps in front of Klaus's hybrid lapdog speeding full on at him down the street in a black SUV. Would've killed him if Alaric hadn't made it in time to shove her little brother out of the way, taking the hit himself, the girl just a step behind, screaming for both their lives._

_It's a nightmarish moment, a moment of startling clarity. It's the moment she first realizes what it really means, being TatiaElena. Elena's conflicted about Klaus, Tatia's conflicted about Stefan, and it's enough to temper each other, to temper her two disparate personalities. But on several things, they are one. Tatia loves Jeremy because Elena loves him, because her brother becomes their brother, and there is no schism inside them where he's concerned. It leads her to see finally the danger behind who she is now._

_As fiercely as Elena loves, Tatia loves fiercer. Deeper. Devastatingly. Merging with Tatia has made her stronger, confused, older and wiser, less destructible, heart and soul. But it has also made her more vulnerable. If she loses Jeremy, it will hit her twice as hard. It will wreck her apart. She'll never survive it._

_Knowing this was Niklaus's doing, though unsurprising to the eighteen-year-old, leaves a distinctly powerful scar in the werewolf. A shock. She's wounded in a way that freezes her up, a profoundly feminine way, a romantic way, sick with betrayal._

_Beyond the sick shock and injury, she is _pissed_._

_She storms through the gates into his house, his appropriated mansion under renovations, crawling with sired hybrids, starts screaming with tearful rage the second that she sees him, spitting nails and wetly upset, shoving at his chest. He shoves back, sure, but throws one of his hybrid's into a wall for touching her when he tries to intervene on his sire's behalf._

_"__You nearly killed my brother! My brother!" she rails._

_"__He's not your brother, love. What does it matter? You're not—"_

_"__I AM STILL ELENA!" she hollers, burning at his nonchalance, at the fury, teeth gritting. "He's my brother. He's _mine_. I am Elena. And whatever else I may be, I will _never_ let you hurt my people," she fiercely swears, sickly swears, churning with the storm inside._

_Expression sobering from its previous dismissal, blinking at her deadly crying passion, taken aback, he's almost regretful. Almost sheepish. "I'm sorry, sweetheart," he says after a second of studying her, of reflection, sounding sincere. Sighing out. "I didn't think—"_

_"__What?" she cuts harshly over him. "That I would care?!"_

_"__I needed you invested. If anyone can manipulate Stefan into standing down, it's you."_

_"__So you should've come to me. You should've asked!"_

_He hesitates, truth escaping offhandedly, "It didn't occur to me."_

_"__Goddamn it, Klaus." Eyes shining, head shaking, heat dying into tired exasperation and useless hurt, she shoves him again, lackluster this time, turns around, trying to get out of this. Before she accrues anything else to regret. But when he catches her, holds her from behind, trapping her here, all that furious energy resurges and she's railing at him again, elbows and heels and bucking and struggling against his imprisoning grasp, screaming and crying in sheer frustration, sheer distress, half hysteria. She's weak, too helpless to hurt him in this stupid human body, too powerless to protect the people she can't lose. Protect them from the one person she wants most._

_"__Elena, Elena, _stop_. Stop this now." He locks his arms around the girl and holds tight, squeezing stronger through her struggles, her enraged thrashing, lashing out, but he's calm, hushing at her, his lips parted and brushing her hair, pressed against her ear, his jaw to her damp cheek. Not mad, not punishing, just squeezing until she can't breathe, until she quells. And then he says softly, "I made a mistake."_

_"__You tried to kill my brother," she chokes out, breathless and intense, ragged and broken. Tired and defeated and miserable and accusingly calmed. Her knees are trembling, and when they give out, he lowers with her to the sawdust covered floor, a gutted sigh shuddering out of her as his restraining grip becomes an overbearing embrace. She stops trying to get away, except it's too late, because she's already gone. "It's not like it was before. It's not like it was. You tried to kill my brother."_

_"__I'm sorry, love. I made a mistake."_

_But she just keeps murmuring, head falling forward, eyes falling closed, "It's not the same. It's never going to be the same. We're not who we were."_

_"__Elena—"_

You can do what no one else can do to me, _she realizes._ We're dangerous to each other.

* * *

><p>One week after Halloween, things are as grim around the French Quarter as they were when they begun. But hope lingers now like a breath of fresh air in the room, in the thickest tension riding between them all, feeling something coming. Gearing up for the exchange, gearing up to save Elijah and face Esther, everybody is wound pretty tight, but the depressed dread of their anticipation is laced with lighter things now, even if just an undercurrent. They gather in the core atrium, a strange team-up to be sure, passing time until it's right to move. They arm up, sort things out, waiting restlessly for the moment, for the time they know Esther will be out and preoccupied with the spell she plans to cast at midnight, if their intel is to be trusted.<p>

Marcel flirts, Elena laughs, Klaus glowers.

While the boys drift off to deal with other related factors, the girl finds her gaze straying off to the side, straying to Hayley. Somber and quiet, lost in her own head, big round brown eyes staring sightlessly into the void. She's under the corner eaves of the second story wraparound, rear corridor entrance at her back, a little to her right, half concealed from the compound by the columns and green blades of tall potted ferns. With a rueful sigh, Elena tears her attention way, disappears into the kitchen, trying to block out the darker things that weigh her down when she looks at Hayley and is reminded. She washed the blood off her hands when she first got back and put Ansel out of her mind, put grief and heartache and murder and loss and drama aside, compartmentalizing like an expert so she could be lighthearted with the men, be focused for what lies ahead, be alive and breathing and not drowning under an eternity of missed chances and unending pain. She's had enough practice, between Tatia's thousand years of doing it well and Elena's own shorter life experience overflowing with it. But looking at Hayley, it's hard to not feel it all. So freaking hard.

Hayley reminds her of so many things. Thousands of them really. Some good, but most bad. Elena is a new person, on a new dawn, partly because of all that she's gone through these last few years, of course, but mainly because Tatia's shadow has changed her. Irrevocably. Vitally. For the better, she thinks. But it's funny, how two shadow souls joined together could be more substantial than their template ever was. And Hayley, for some reason, she speaks to both sides of the doppelgänger, exposing the divide while unifying it at the same time, reminding her that even though she pretends there isn't a line, isn't separation anymore, there is still two people to make up her whole. She isn't sure why Hayley speaks to her so intimately, so unconsciously, without knowing she does, without trying, but it's innate.

It's unnerving. Comforting. That contradiction.

"Anxious?" she guesses, sitting down in the opposite chair, sliding a china cup of steaming tea across the ceramic café table towards the hybrid woman.

Without a glance her way, without a blink, Hayley wraps fingers around the cup and admits, "It's a lot, taking on the Original mother, isn't it?"

Ankles crossed, Elena sets her forearms to the tabletop, leaning forward towards the hybrid, a small wry smile on her lips, hazel eyes fixed. "Technically, _I'm_ the Original mother," she says, not sure why, just feeling it's the right thing to tell her. "She's the mother of the Originals, sure, but I was the source that gave their immortal existences life. I sired them. I sired you all."

Incredulous, it gets her turning to look at Elena finally. Gets her picking up her tea to drink. "How is that possible? Aren't you, like, seventeen?"

With a resigned sigh, she swallows a sip of her coffee and sets the mug down, head turning. "I am Tatiana Mihailovna Petrova, daughter of Mihail, mother of Anya. The doppelgänger that came before." Which is true, truer than she'd like, because it sounds as if Tatia took over Elena and Elena is just a name now. She knows it's not like that, even if it seems that way sometimes. But even as sure as she is, she has insecurities, she worries over it herself, feels the creep of quiet doubt in the dark of night, lying in her bed, so she doesn't like talking this way. She doesn't often let herself. But Hayley needs to hear it. She should know.

Which the other girl takes in stride. "Mother of all vampires," Hayley drawls thoughtfully. "You'll have to tell me the story someday about how that happened. I thought you were Elena."

"I am. I am both."

"Weird, but whatever."

And she just has to laugh, spilling a slight slosh of her coffee with the breathy bark of it as it leaves her chest, head tossed with humor. "_Exactly_," she exclaims richly. "Exactly."

Klaus and Marcel have gone down into the cellar to check on caught Kol, kept chained at sublevel in the compound after Marcel dragged him back, planning to torture him over to their side when they have the time. Because _of course_ Niklaus would believe that is the way to earn someone's loyalty. She'll probably intervene before it gets that far, since there are better ways, the _right_ way to reach Kol. But not yet. Elijah first.

While they wait, she decides to tell Hayley a little about her real self, a little of her history, keeping it light, keeping to the abridged version. She tells her she was a werewolf, the daughter of an alpha from a great pack who grew within a lesser pack, a rougher pack, after her father had died and her mother ran off with a brutish wolf, dragging her along. She was raised with her half brother then among unkind ruffians. Savages really. After her husband died, she didn't want her child to grow up in a pack like that, surrounded by crude cruel souls, so once the baby was born, she took her daughter and her little brother and set off into the wild on their own. Searching for her father's pack.

"Ansel took us in," she says softly, staring down into her mug, watching the cream swirl in the bitter black. "When my brother got in trouble for stealing in the village, where we weren't supposed to be, because the wolves weren't allowed near the human settlements, I intervened. It's how I met Niklaus and Elijah."

"When they were human."

"Yes."

"What were they like?" Hayley starts to ask, but even as she finishes the question, a crease forms in her brow, doubt flickering across her pretty features. She slumps low in her chair and shakes her head, angling away, dismissing quickly, "Never mind. Keep going."

And so she does, knowing the hybrid will ask again, someday, when she's ready. She explains how she and Niklaus met again on the night he first changed, met in wolf form, became human together once more, getting swept up in the full moon rush. They began an unwise affair but just couldn't stop themselves. Just couldn't keep away from each other. "A real _Romeo and Juliet_," she mutters, wry with sarcastic humor. Tensions between the three factions continued to worsen as several forces brought the long simmering problems to a boil. The witches against the wolves, the wolves against the new creatures, the vampires, the Mikaelsons against the wolves and then the witches too who forsake them, Esther struggling to find a way to smooth the strife between her coven and her family because of what she'd done, broken nature's laws. The vampires were a bad enough betrayal, but a hybrid abomination, a werewolf twisted into something so unnatural, neither the witches nor the wolves could abide that. Mikael wanted to kill him, to appease them, to appease himself. It was Esther's idea to bind his wolf side, trap it inside himself, and then the Mikaelson abominations would leave their territory and never come back, conceding to both the coven and the pack. There was only so much mediating Ansel could do, and it went up in smoke the second Mikael murdered him, finding out about Esther's affair. By then, the powder keg had been lit and an explosion was inevitable. Tatia and Niklaus were only making it worse.

"Why didn't you run?" Hayley wants to know. "Just take your family and go."

"He wouldn't leave his siblings," Elena tells her. "By the time we realized we had no choice, things were so bad, moving so quickly, it was too late."

"What happened?"

"Esther had made a deal with the witches to keep them off her back. I didn't know it, but she had sold me to the coven, knowing they would need my blood to work for the ritual that would bind Niklaus. It all happened so fast that day. They tried to take me, but the wolves came down from the hills after me, and it was chaos. The pack blamed me for Ansel's death. They wanted to kill me so the witches couldn't take power from my blood. Klaus tried to fight off the witches when they came for me, Elijah too, even Rebekah, but no one could stand against that magic. Especially with Esther trying to keep her children out of the conflict. And when the wolves got themselves involved, it was madness. The pack got ahold of me, the witches took Klaus instead, and we all went wild."

"Who ended up with who?"

"That day?" Elena answers, solemn and struck. "There was nothing but death."

It's hard to find the words but keep the memories banked, keep the vivid realness of those dark barbaric days at bay, and she still sees shards of it in her head, as much as she struggles to not let it in. She tells Hayley of how the day turned out, death and blood and grief all around, how she slaughtered her own wolves, her own kin, cut them down with teeth and nails and knife and sword and betrayal and ferocious love for the man they were standing in her way to. It was not about saving herself that day. It was about Niko. She thought he was dead. She saw him tear into the witches, lose control, saw glimpses between broad shoulders of blood and violence and heard the screams and the piercing screech of the starlings in the sky, vicious magic slinging in the air at them all. When he turned on them, Elijah and Kol and Rebekah stood against them to help their brother. It was all the excuse the witches needed to shift an onslaught onto the family in its entirety. Against the entire village. As she was dragged off by her kin, away to the hills, wolves lingering behind, caught in the melee of wild strife, Niklaus massacred every witch in his way until none remained. He fought beside his siblings and he fought against them. Tatia killed every wolf in her way. Every wolf that attacked. Half the pack died that day. And more witches than that. Mikaelsons fell. Every loyalty was torn apart by the time it ended.

In the aftermath, she and Niklaus were reunited, falling into each other's arms in weeping raw bloody relief. They didn't go back, couldn't, so they ran, leaving massacres in their wake. And she tried to pretend it was okay, would be okay, because they were together. That was all they needed. That was all that mattered. But the coven elders remained, and they were not about to leave them in peace, not after all that horror.

When her child had been threatened by hateful condemning Mikael, she had sent her away with her brother, sent her small fragile family as far away from this place as possible before the war had crested. She didn't dare try to follow, worried she'd lead their enemies to her daughter, but living without her was agony. Even with Niko beside her, it was a gaping wound, a crater in her chest, her head, in her bones. And dread refused to leave her alone. She knew it was coming, the day their sins caught up to them, the day the witches would finally win.

Finn was the brother that betrayed Niklaus after the first battle. He and Tatia had retreated into the badlands into hiding, and he thought his older brother was on his side, because he had fought for him in the battle with the witches and wolves. He had been one of the few, of Elijah and Rebekah and Kol, but they should have known they could never trust him to betray Esther. For Finn, it was always Mother above all. Her loyal little firstborn. Finn had lured Nik out of the mountains into the grasp of Esther's vengeful coven. Tatia of course followed. Gave herself over. Died by their hands so Niklaus could be bound and peace could be found between the Mikaelson clan and the coven. She blames Finn bitterly for that, almost as much as she blames insidious Esther and merciless Mikael.

"After the binding ritual, lost in his rage, Klaus killed his mother. He nearly killed Finn until Elijah talked him down, convinced him to spare their brother. Mikael was determined to finish what he'd started, and the siblings didn't want to face their father, so they ran."

"What happened to you?" Hayley whispers, eyes intent on Elena's distracted face.

"Me?" she replies, voice lightening falsely, meeting her gaze as she shakes off the heavy past. "I spent a millennium in purgatory, watching over those I left behind."

"How did you become what you are now?"

"I told you how I acquired the dark angel powers, how I was killed by Mikael and struck a deal with a leviathan to come back, but what I left out was that my soul on the Other Side found the current doppelgänger's and arranged the pact to begin with."

"Wait. I'm confused."

"As Elena, I died when Mikael confronted Klaus two years ago. As Tatia, I brought the rider to her and brokered the deal that got us resurrected. Our souls merged and I came back as both. We kicked the rider out, but kept each other. Accepted each other."

"So you're Tatia and Elena. So I should think of you as one person who's lived a long time and gone through a couple incarnations. Right?"

"Yeah. Like that."

"Okay then."

And she can see it on her face then, in the sudden silence that stretches between the women, she can see that she wants to ask about Anya. Wants to ask, _What happened to your daughter?_ But because she understands the unspoken, the implied, she doesn't ask. She won't.

Their soft-spoken conversation is abruptly disrupted when Klaus and Marcel come stalking out across the courtyard towards the main tunnel entrance, eldest Mikaelson brother trussed up in shackles and in tow. Klaus says, "Time to go."

Hayley and Elena push out their chairs, rising smoothly to their feet, falling into line behind the preceding guys. Joshua and Gia pick up the parade in their wake.

To ignore the echoes of history is foolish. She'd have to be blind to not see the resemblance between Hayley and herself, both physical and temperamentally. The fact that the woman could be her sister, could be a blurred mirror image, it's an inescapable observation, especially when standing side by side. That Niklaus would fall roughly into bed with a werewolf girl with a face like that, it irks her just a little. That he would resent himself for it afterwards, that his attraction to her would irritate the Original hybrid … well, that just makes her smile. He never did want to find another Tatia. That's why he was always so cruel to the ones which came after her, the ones with her face, the ones so starkly not Tatia. Always lashing out, punishing them for the face they wore and the draw he felt towards them for it, the kindness he wanted to show them and hated himself because of. It's why he's been fascinated so often by women of her total polar opposite, women with zero resemblance, women like Caroline and Camille, young souls with fair hair and bright unsullied eyes. It bothers him that he's drawn to Hayley, that he feels the kinship he does with the little wolf, because the truth is in her eyes, her face, her voice, the way she moves and the choices she makes. They both know why. It's the same reason he was so cruel to Elena when she survived the awakening.

But to reduce Hayley to merely a facsimile or some sort of empty replacement would be a lie. One she has no desire to tell.


	9. Part VIII

_To love is to destroy_…

The gang closes ranks and advances up the aisle of Lafayette Cemetery towards their enemy. Klaus leading, Elena to his left side, Marcel behind her, Hayley at his right, her fingers fisted in Finn's hair, her blade held lethally against his throat. "_Esther_," Klaus calls, his voice booming and harsh, almost a roar, angry and commanding. The witch turns, flanked by her lackey wolves, ready for them, expecting them. She's got a disobedient stray strung up against the head of a great tomb, meat hooks in his arms holding him high like Christ, blood streaking white skin with wet crusted red, matted blond hair covering his face. She's got a tight trio of little casters waiting on her left side, and she's got Elijah on her right, off a ways, eerily withdrawn. They lay eyes on him as soon as they come to a stop at the mouth of the main aisle, noble brother stepping out past the corner of crumbling stone that hid him from their line of sight, one hand buried in his slacks pocket, expression troubled. They've got themselves a standoff. "Release him, or your precious lapdog will be lost to oblivion," Klaus says, and on cue Hayley gives his hair a yank back just to make the firstborn Mikaelson wince, make him grunt and grit his teeth through a sneer, her blade nicking dark skin, drawing just a drop of blood.

Esther is standing at the head of her army, the pinnacle of confrontation, hands folded in front of her and face serene. As if she has everything well in control. As if it doesn't matter at all. "Elijah is by my side of his own choice, Niklaus. He's free to do as he pleases."

Focus shifting to Elijah, his frustration and pleading and impatience are clear when he says, "Brother, please, this is madness."

"This is _necessity_," Elijah counters, but there is something missing. Something absent from him that makes him who he is. "We are damned creatures, Niklaus. Why reject so violently the chance at our redemption?"

Which is when Elena steps forward. There is no point reasoning with him. This isn't the true Elijah who can be talked to. This is Esther's creation. The words she speaks are only to buy time. To distract. "This isn't you. This isn't the way you want redemption, Elijah."

Dark eyes narrowed, unfathomable, there is something robotic about his face as he studies her closely, trying to gauge her. This is the face from her dream on Halloween. This is the Elijah with no shirt and no free thought and blood splattering his body. "No one knows more viscerally than you what monsters we are."

"Our _choices_ are what make us who we are," she argues strongly. "Whatever monster you think you are, you can be just as much that monster in the body of a witch."

"Enough, Petrova," Esther cuts in, and Elena's eyes cut coldly to her, that open imploring of her face for Elijah hardens to murder.

While she's been easing toward him, keeping their attention on her, Marcel slipped sideways from the aisle, disappearing behind the row of mausoleums, rounding to come up behind Elijah. Wolves perched on high see him go, but they don't stop him, no one wanting to be the initiator when they've got such valuable leverage. When she sees Marcel over Elijah's shoulder, she acts. Surges forward even as Klaus is blurring past her towards his mother. She crashes into Elijah as Marcel snatches him from behind by the bend of his elbows, restraining his arms as she pushes him out of the way, down a side aisle, their blur of motion sweeping him from the center of the breaking storm. But his fingers latch around her wrists and he drives backward, then suddenly she's not pushing but being pulled, Marcel's not holding but being pinned, slammed back into the mossy stone wall of a smaller crypt. The bluesman makes a sound of pain, winded when he impacts the rock hard enough to crack its foundation, but he doesn't let go.

"_Elijah_!" she cries through the rush, through the din of violence breaking out in Lafayette. Voice stern but hurried, hurt but powerful, "Elijah, _stop_."

That disconnect she'd felt in him before is stronger than ever. It makes her hesitate. Sets her off for just a split second. Just long enough to lose the upper hand as a witch's magic slams into her side like a Mack truck to the ribs. His chest slips from her fingers as she's ripped away and lands rolling across the grass, let go of like the release of a twister, struggling up quick as she can to lurch forward. Marcel gets thrown off and she sees him flying across the aisle to crash hard into another tomb, dropping crumpled to the ground, but Elena can't slow down. She hits the witch in a blurring tackle, diving through the air at her, taking her down fast. Her fangs wrench through a soft throat, opening her jugular, and she takes her skull between her palms and knocks it sideways against the nearest fallen obelisk just to be thorough.

"You shouldn't have come for me, Elena," says a soft intense voice in her ear, strong forearm banding across her collarbone, hoisting her backward off the grass.

"This isn't you," she says again, pointlessly, breathlessly, blood dripping from her sharp teeth and eyes black. She drives her heel back into his shin, snapping bone, and twists his thumb from his wrist, ducking to spin under the arm he clutches her with and snap a vicious front kick to his solar plexus, sending him stumbling, bent in on himself to brace.

There are werewolves all around her now, closing in, not sure what their orders are. Klaus is keeping Esther busy as Hayley still holds Finn hostage, not a foolproof bargaining chip but sure better than nothing. Marcel is picking himself up, dusting himself off, jumping back into the fray to keep the wolves at bay. There is so much to distract her, so much chaos to worry about here, threats to mind, but all she can afford to concentrate on is Elijah. Risking herself to clasp Elijah roughly between the temples before he can attack, forcing the Original to his knees before her, forcing into his mind. A blunt crude tool probably causing more damage, because she doesn't have time to be the scalpel he deserves. Seeing the web his mother has spun through his psyche. And then, as the fight rages on all around her, she begins to unravel the construction.

Memories rush over her like the battering of whitecap waves that refuse to let her catch her breath. Things she'd forced herself to forget. Things she'd never wanted to relive.

_The Samhainn revelry in the village, Niklaus sneaking her in wearing an equinox masque to mingle with the villagers, as if she's one of them. Dancing and drinking and being pulled close by Niko in the bonfire light, being kissed through laughter. His arm warm and winding around her waist, her back to his chest. She spots Elijah cross the quad of mud and autumnal leaves and her joy sobers at the troubled look of him. Breaking away from Niklaus, she follows him off into the shadows. Worried. Empathic._

_They talk softly by the pigpen about the future, speaking obliquely about the dissatisfaction with life he feels, about the sense of wistful possibility between them. He has the longing look in his eyes she's grown accustomed to, grown to be wary of, the longing like he wants to kiss her, and for just a split second she even entertains the desire, half hoping he will, though it leaves her torn._

_In the end, he does not, and she is grateful for his honor, because it keeps her from facing a hard choice. To hurt him with rejection or betray her mate._

But then she feels a pull in her gut, a tether yanking her back when she wants to move ahead, dragging her into a retread. They're standing together by the pen, too close, the firelight and din of joy from the villagers nearby a muffled cacophony. She finds herself saying things she hadn't meant to say. Things she doesn't remember saying. Touching his face. Letting him tug her gently into a victorious kiss.

_"__I choose you, Elijah."_ But that's not right, is it?

_Not long after that night, when Niklaus loses control under the full moon, she comes across him and his brother in the woods. He's huddled and conflicted, innocents strewn as corpses all around him, and Elijah stands over the hybrid, tormented but brave._

The sequence was this:_ a witch came to the wolves, crossing into the badlands, looking for the doppelgänger. The witch had pinned her with magic and sliced into her skin, taking with her a goblet of Tatia's blood, her potent lifeblood stolen. Through her pain and fury, she did not recognize the witch's face. The mother of the two males she'd crossed paths with, the brothers that occupied her thoughts ever since, who she'd snuck into the village to observe from shadow in secret a time or two. She hadn't known why the witch needed her blood, just that it held a great power, as she's always known. Her pack has used it to avoid having to turn on the moon before. But what the witch could want with it, she hadn't realized._

_Then one day, shortly after, one night running as a wolf under the moon, she meets the hybrid on his first transition. She meets and mates, swept away in a storm of instinct and overwhelming desire, of powerful instant reaction. It wouldn't be until much later, until she was dead and everything was done, that she'd learn why he felt so familiar to her. So destined. It was because of his father. But she didn't need an explanation, not right away, because she's an animal, and animals only feel. They feel and they follow it. She helps him control his wolf, his unbound animal side, tries her best to guide him through the monstrous thing he's become, this new species of cursed creatures. Through that helping, she bonds with Elijah as well. She doesn't mean to, but it happens anyway. She would never betray her mate. She just can't help the feelings inside of her._

_That sunrise, when she comes to find them after hearing the screams in the trees, learning the news of a wolf attack through the human settlement, she rushes down to find the brothers, knowing something has gone wrong. Finds them in the woods, circled by slaughtered bodies, Niklaus bloodied and breaking down under the guilt._

Remembrance grows hazy at this point. The daylight starts to shimmer a fraction too bright, the trees a shade too sharp, the world's saturation like a poorly colored movie. It's so subtle but it's minute details that give the devil away. She feels her skull pounding, wants to shake it and shut her eyes, push away the memory, but it crawls back in, shivers down her spine, whispering vicious things, the devil on her shoulder, the demon in her head.

The cut bleeding on her palm draws out Elijah's bloodlust and, seeing the demon fill his eyes, she swipes her arm, smacking him across the face. Snapping her strong commandment, "_Control_ your thirst." But he attacks her. She screams, but he won't let go, bearing her down to the ground beneath him. Draining away her life. Taking everything. She's crying, tears wet and salty down her cheeks, her limbs weak. And then she's gone and he's devastated. He's a monster. But that's not right either. Is it?

_No._

Fighting through Esther's cobwebs, through the lies trying to confuse her, trying to dull her senses with illusion, she shows Elijah how _she_ remembers that day.

_Rushing to Klaus's side, dropping to her knees in front of his balled up form, trying to reassuring him that these things happen. That it wasn't his fault._

_Troubled by his brother's affliction, more monstrous than his own, Elijah draws her away to speak in lowered tones, standing close. "I fear for my brother, Tatiana. I don't know what my father will do when I take him home."_

_"__Home? You're not taking him home, Elijah. Look at how that has gone. I will bring him into the hills with me. It's time he should be with his own people, where he can learn how to control the beast."_

_As she tries to push past him to Nik, he takes her by the arm, holding her still as his head shakes in refusal. "No, Tatia. I can't let you take him."_

_"__Elijah," she says strongly, pulling from his gentle grasp. She tries to turn, to walk away from him, but he grabs at her, wrenching her back around to him. Harshened by his worry. His fear. They stop at once, freeze together, startled by his roughness, by the suddenness of their closeness. His eyes cut down to the gash across her shoulder that the trees grazed on her dash to reach them, the torn dress stark, the matted blood beneath making his veins rise red. He breathes in deep, struggling against that abrupt wave of hunger, the monster awakening. "Elijah," she says again, softer now, starker in concern. "_Control_ it."_

_"__I do not know that I can," he rasps, pained by want, leaning in, pulling her ever closer against her resistance._

_"__You are not your hunger. You are not the beast. This dark magic is trying to corrupt your soul," she insists, not really understanding it, but knowing this is going badly. "Elijah."_

_She should've talked to him, kept talking him through it, quelling him, comforting him with that strict alpha quality Ansel gave her. But instead she let the quickening of her heart affect her and gave into her animal impulse and reacted violently. Foolishly. As his fingers crush at the soft bend of her elbows, she slams her knee up into his stomach, knocking her brow into his nose and kicking him back. She turns and runs, like a fool, like a human, silly prey running to provoke the predator, and of course he catches her. Snatches her up in his arms from behind, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her throat as she cries out, his hand over her mouth muffling the sound so Niklaus would not hear._

_Run, rabbit, run, she thinks. A thought she's had a million times, a wry little smile curving at her lips as she did, watching prey from the thick of trees or the high vantage point of a rock above the forest, thinking it as she hunts. Because she's a hunter, she's a predator, so she knows better than anyone … it's when you run that you're dead. It's your fatal mistake._

_He bears her down to the ground, trapping her body against his, so much bigger than she, tightening when she jerks and fights and thrashes, drinking deep, draining her lifeblood in his ravenous lust. That gnawing insatiable hunger. That monster inside._

It's a hard truth to show him, and his mind tries to shirk away from it, reliving the horror his mother had revealed, but she can't let him. He has to keep going. He has to see the rest.

_Eventually, she gasps out and goes lax, knowing from her own animal side that fighting him will only make the beast strong. It's only a moment she takes to resign herself, to realize it, but it feels like eternity. "Elijah," she whimpers, barely conscious. "Elijah, my love…"_

_Her fingers slip from his shoulder, hitting the dirt, and the cursed one comes to his senses. Realizes in horror what he's doing, who he's killing, realization turning that lust to sickness, breaking loose, ripping himself off of the woman. Stricken._

Sheer stubbornness, no skill, has her pushing through the fabrication, pushing herself past the forbidden red door and hauling him with her, freeing the secrets locked up beyond there. Freeing the truth.

_"__Tatia," he breathes. "Odin, what have I done? Tatia!"_

_Glancing fearfully into the woods where his brother rests, Elijah lurches forward in panic, lifts the limp girl up into his arms, carries her home. Takes her to the only person he knows can possibly help. He takes her to his mother. Because he's panicked, and desperate, and Mother is the first thing he thinks of, the only hope he feels he has. He can't lose her. He can't take that wild wonderful fire and smother it. It can't be him. It can't be Tatia._

_"__Mother!" he cries, staggering up to the cottage, and Esther comes running out._

_"__Elijah, what have you done?!" she exclaims, seeing the girl in his arms, looking like death. When she pulls the wolf girl from his arms, he collapses to his knees, watching her pull Tatia into the cottage and close the door._

And from there, the haze attempts to rolls over them once more. The thick dazing fog trying to herd them out from the red door, trying to ensorcell them with more lies. She knows its signs now and she doesn't let it take hold, shakes it off and banishes it away before it can touch them, before it can stick and cling like spiderwebs.

_She wakes somewhat healed, still alive but barely, lying on a pallet in front of the hearth, the witch's crafting tools scattered around. The day has gone, the dark has fallen, and she is weak with loss. Esther is looking down at her kindly. Kindly like a viper. The serpent beneath the flower. She knows better than to believe the lie, because she can smell the stink of ill will in her nose like the sting of the fire's smoke._

_"__Little werewolf," she speaks to Tatia, voice low and melodic, eyes glowing in the firelight, "I told you to keep away from my children."_

_Licking her lips, sipping in a ragged breath, she replies, "I told you I wouldn't."_

_Esther snaps a twig and throws it into the flame, making blue sparks explode. She cringes, turning her head from its brightness, its heat, shutting her eyes. In that second of distraction, the witch pushes her two hands down on the wolf's face, sealing her mouth, blocking her nose, pressing all her weight down on Tatia. Suffocating the girl._

_Eyes widening, she writhes helplessly under her, still tired, still weak. And then the wolf comes out. The real wolf, dark Traveler eyes flashing golden, inhuman black ringed with lava, animal rising with a smothered growl that vibrates dangerously in her chest. Fingers fumble blindly outward, latching onto a pottery of clay, smashing it roughshod over the witch's head, knocking her aside. Swinging upright off the table, Tatia drives her fist into Esther's temple, blacking the witch out. Breathing shakily in relief as adrenaline is allowed to fade._

_She staggers tiredly from the Mikaelson cottage, leaving it behind without a second glance. Finds poor Elijah collapsed by the falls, on his knees, vacant as if by magic, by grief and guilt. The shock of seeing her standing there seems to snap him free._

_"__Tatia!" he exclaims, rising in wonder. "You live."_

_"__I'm of a strong mettle," she quips, small half smile on her lips as her knees buckle when he gets close, letting him help her down, sitting beside him, leaning for support into his shoulder. "Elijah," she sighs, cupping his cheek, feeling reflective. Feeling resigned and exhausted after the day they've had. "Your mother did this to you. She condemned your soul to purgatory in her pursuit of making her children invincible. This affliction, this hunger you feel, it is still so new." And as she'd said to Niklaus, she tells him fiercely, "This was not your fault. You will learn control. You will gain restraint. I know this. I promise it. But you cannot blame yourself for what _almost_ was."_

_In a moment of selfishness, of sorrow and longing and regret, he touches her cheek with furled hesitant fingers. Touches her face and kisses her lips. She doesn't pull away._

_Which is when the witches find them. Esther's coven come to lend deliverance. The wolves descend from the hills. Chaos rises._

Untangling Esther's web is an almost impossible thing. It's only Tatia's millennia experience and the leftover leviathan essence that allows her to get in to begin with. Luck that lets her force her way through, blundering forward, and shatter the intricate prism reflecting half truths and hallucinations in his conflicted mind.

Outside the memory, she releases her white-knuckled grip on his consciousness and steps unsteadily backward. Returning to herself in pieces, acclimating painstakingly to the present in a matter of rushed worrying seconds. Faint surprise flickers to find Marcel at her side, his hand on her arm keeping her upright, the wolves all gone, the cemetery all but abandoned. Klaus and Hayley watch them, the brunette's body yearning visibly to go to Elijah but holding herself back, waiting for it to play out.

They must have given her Finn and made Esther retreat.

"Elijah?" she asks cautiously, one hand reaching slowly across the air. With his head hung, she can't see his face. Frozen on his haunches, shoulders hunched, painting a wary picture she doesn't know whether to be triumphant for yet. When her grasping fingers slide softly to the side of his neck, skin to skin, he shakes the stillness from him with an abrupt jolt. Rises fast and has her lifted off her feet by a hand wrapped around her throat, his eyes still black, still so empty, nothing alive in his features, muscles of his face slack without reaction. Elena gasps, chokes, prying at his wrist. She can't breathe and she can't make him let go, but her other palm lands on Marcel's chest in reflex, shoving him away from them. Rasping out, "_Elijah_. Don't do this."

It's not enough. He's still under his mother's sway. He's seen the truth, but it's not enough. She has to set him free. She has to rip Esther's goddamned inky grip off him. Utterly. And the only way she knows how to do that … _the only way_ … it's not what she wanted.

She's got dark angel powers she keeps secret, has kept secret for years now, powers that have only evolved since dying under that bridge, since becoming a vampire. So long hiding it from her friends and family, not even showing Caroline, not even Jeremy, and after one week she's shown these strangers almost everything. Will show them more now.

Elena uses her healing light whenever she feels the urge, the pull to fix someone, to take their pain, because that's easier. That's a kind of power that takes nothing from her, because she's taking their pain onto herself, tucking it away. But the real power, that's very different. She's used the purifying light in a pinch once or twice, but she tries like hell to avoid it since it's so dangerous, so pricey. Since it takes something from her each time. Another little piece of her. Or maybe it lets more out, works itself a little more free each use, a little closer to consuming her. She doesn't know. She doesn't understand it. She just knows the dread she feels when she looks in that box, when she reaches for the lock, willing it up to the surface. Dread and fear and an urgent dark voice whispering, _"No, no, no. Don't do it."_

For Elijah, she tells that voice to shut the fuck up. She reaches in and grabs that power with her fist, yanks it loose and spreads it over him, feeling the sudden dizzying wash of white light and pure otherworld energy take them both over, blinding the others.

It rips through him with such violent vehemence, but he lets go of her gently, her feet finding the grass gracefully as he sinks back to his knees, body bowed arch, that light coursing through the core of him like a throttling beam once it narrows, focusing in. He's yelling over the rushing buzzing noise of it, but nothing coherent, just riding it out. And then the light goes, leaving him with disorienting suddenness, and Elijah falls lax.

A witch could've done it easier. Simpler. But she's no witch.

Winded and sober, standing above him, bringing him back, Elena lets her hand drop heavy on his shoulder, leaning for support, claiming him from that black work. This time, his hung head never lifts. "Your mother is a master manipulator. You said so yourself. You know this." Tiredly, forcefully, quietly, she commands, "Don't let her undo you."


	10. Part IX

_When the sun goes down_…

In the aftermath, she watches the stilted unsure longing in Elijah and Hayley each when they come together in the courtyard, ships passing in the night, both trying to catch one another yet neither knowing how. Neither unafraid enough. She observes them from the upstairs landing, hidden in shadow behind a belvedere of French stone. She watches and so somberly recognizes Elijah's hesitance, his avoidance, recognizes the disappointed confusion in Hayley. Feels for the two of them, she really does. They obviously care for each other. They obviously _want_ the same thing but neither knows how to ask for it.

People rarely do.

"Thinking out loud again, darling?" his lilted voice shivers over the bare skin of her shoulder a second before he shows up at her hip, his long deadly fingers falling to the slate blue wooden railing beside hers.

Her hand starts to lift automatically away but he twines his pinky over hers, holds her there with an impish grin, his blue eyes glimmering. With an eye roll, she gives a long suffering sigh and retorts, "I didn't say anything."

"Your face did. Your face says absolutely everything."

"Quit reading me."

"But you're so expressive," he purrs, only half teasingly. "You're old enough to know better."

"Silly me, I thought this was a safe place."

Though it's said casually, an offhanded volley, it makes him stop. Makes him still. Gets this look in his gaze that makes her go warm and molten inside. It makes her want to shiver. Huskily, "Come down and have dinner with me. We have much to discuss, don't we?"

Elena turns away. "If this is about the Traveler border—"

"Come along, sweetheart."

She stops in her tracks, his grip on her unwinding, his tone brooking no negotiation tonight. She doesn't want to have this fight now, after the day she's had, after the week, because she just wants to sleep, and to celebrate their small victory, and she wants to go home and put to rest all that's still in turmoil at Whitmore. She doesn't want to have to stand her ground against Niklaus on an issue she's still confused about. And anything else he might want to discuss, she thinks she won't have the stomach for. Not tonight. She's been too much Tatia lately, not enough of Elena, all this current conflict drudging up ancient memories. Ancient pain. It separates her two halves. Makes her feel out of sorts.

"_Elena_," he hums pointedly, breaking her hesitation.

As resignation and defeat take over, she sighs and her shoulders slump and her feet follow him down the stairs. Silence sits heavy between them as they ready a meal, saddled with all the thousand unspoken things thickening the air, moving effortless and absently in tandem as they pass each other, work around each other, tangle together in thoughtless teamwork.

Her grilling hitches for just a moment, her gaze drawing to the glint of the steel blade he uses to slice up colorful bell peppers beside her, seeds sticking to his fingers, juices glistening. She is thinking of the countless things she's witnessed him do with a weapon like that over her years, as Elena and as Tatia from purgatory. It's not things she likes to ponder, because it's difficult to reconcile those haunting horrors with her feelings for him, protection and loyalty and devotion so unwavering as the wolf and just as strong as who she is now, despite everything. Sometimes, it's the only thing that keeps her up at night, carrying the weight of his atrocious crimes as her own by grace of her love with little resistance. If accepting Stefan's ripper side was torturous, Niklaus cannot compare.

But he was always the exception to her every rule. Even before she merged, even just Elena, it always seemed to work out that way. In a drastically different fashion, certainly, but still the exception. They have such a storied history, she wonders if it's the same for him. She knows him better than he knows himself, but she isn't sure of that.

All this walking down Memory Lane for Elijah has turned her existential.

Once they're settled down at the extravagantly long dining table, fit for last century feasts, candlelight flickering at the shadows and ivory wax melting to the table runner, plates of good food in front of them and wineglasses brimming, she sets her elbows on the wood and rests her tired head in her hands to push back the chestnut locks sweeping over her brow. She breathes out a heavy sigh. He's sat her at the head of the table, the end of a long lonely graceful piece of antique history, carved chair so auspiciously like a throne. The lace trim of the Gothic runner pools above her lap as he takes a place at her side, at the corner seat to her right, deferring to her in a symbolic enigma.

"I'm not your lab rat," she says without preamble, shattering the silence. "I won't risk my life to become your blood bag again. Let's get that straight right away."

"My hybrids were a spectacularly failed experiment, love. I wouldn't risk your life for that," he replies so casually, so instantly, making Elena straighten in surprise, caught off guard as she lifts her head and meets his crystalline eyes. He's got knife and fork in hand, sawing crisscrossed slivers of steak on his plate, his red lips wet with wine and glimmering in the low orange lights. He takes in her disbelief and suspicion and turns his gaze down to his task, curving her a smile, a layered myriad thing with secrets and openness that belies its truest sentiment, which is some mix of smug pleasure and bitter wistfulness. Of hurt that she still believes the worst of him with the reluctance to show her differently. "You're far more useful to me as you are."

"Of course," she drawls, rolling her eyes, sinking lower into her chair. She rests a foot on the edge of his seat under the table, forcing his thigh aside, and picks up her fork to twirl. "Does that mean you'd try to stop me if I wanted to attempt it? Becoming human."

Klaus sets down his silverware for a put upon sigh, exasperation and humor in his features. "Must you be so contrary? Decide your resolve before you fight for it, Elena, love."

A fine dinner and discussing border magic and blood revival so civilly isn't how she saw this all going. The setting is downright romantic and he's being entirely to reasonable for her to trust that charming smile, so she keeps her eyes narrow, studying him, lips pursed in thought, but she doesn't provoke a fight. They argue enough. No need to seek it out.

In the ensuing silence of their stalemate, she finds herself seizing on the unexpectedly open quality to him tonight and curiously asks, "Have you forgiven me yet?"

"For what?" He doesn't look up.

"Killing Kol."

The hybrid stills. Freezes really, struck in sudden deadly pause by her soft words, his good mood gone just so easily. He keeps his focus fixed down at the table as he sits back in his chair, lifts up his drink, attention directing meticulously to the Burgundy for her benefit, so he keeps his baggage in check, every instinct and impulse risen up from her call to memory, to a darker more volatile time between them. After awhile, in a strange tone, he says, "I killed your aunt. Forced your mother to commit suicide in front of your eyes. I murdered your best witch friend, however orchestrated the theatric had been. I sacrificed _you_ for my own purpose and as a result your father gave his life to bring you back. I turned your lover against you. Took him from you. Endangered your brother's life on countless occasions. Which does not touch on the damage I wrought of Tatia's existence." Finally, he raises his eyes and locks with hers. "I could keep going down the list, love. Have you forgiven me for a single one of those sins, sweet Elena?"

Shocked into silence, stillness, she can't respond at first. She takes in a breath, swallows thickly, wets her lips, struggling for the right answer. He doesn't talk like this. Klaus. He doesn't mention these things, speak of his sins, declare them bluntly as what they are without waver on the fact that they need forgiveness. If it wasn't for the Tatia in her, she wouldn't even believe he _remembered_ half the horrible things he'd done to her. To others. She would assume he was just oblivious of the damage he wrecks. "I'm not sure," she says slowly at last. "I've let a lot of that go. But I don't know about forgiveness. I'd like to think I was capable of it."

"After everything we've done to each other, I don't see the point in holding onto our grudges by now." He sits forward to mimic her body language, elbows on the table. "Not with you."

"Agreed," she retorts, dipping her chin, lips stretching into a surprised smile. She laughs in soft wonder. "Never thought I'd see the day though that Klaus Mikaelson was capable of letting go of a grudge."

"What do you mean, sweetheart? I let go of millions of my grudges. They're all dead."

"That's fulfilling them, not letting go," she corrects archly.

"True." Then his countenance washes clear of that reflective solemnity and he flashes her a wicked grin. "Besides, seeing as I fully intend on heading downstairs to torture him over to our side of seeing things once he's had sufficient time to stew, I don't see how I can possibly hold it against you."

"But you do. And before Esther brought him back…" Elena falters. Her dark gypsy eyes draw down to the table, where her long slender fingers rest beneath a dripping candle, hand trembling ever so imperceptibly. Drudging up so much bad stuff she'd put behind her, in this life and the last one, it's taking its toll. "It doesn't change what happened, Nik. It can't erase anything."

"You said you love me."

Which startles her from her despondent reverie, makes her jerk to look at him, gaze wide. Head cocked, she breathes, "What?"

He's distracting her, getting her off a topic that has no satisfactory solution, but he's also voicing thoughts that have been going round and round in his head for days. Round and round unvoiced for years, since the night he watched Elena Gilbert die and resurrect as so much more, as _history_ and an impossible future. She finally broke the rule, finally escaped their construct, and he isn't going to let that slide by. "Trying to save Ansel's life, you told me you both love me. _Love_. Present tense."

"What do you want from me, Klaus?" she huffs, entirely too Elena.

"I want you to expound on that," he answers easily. Honestly. "You were dead for a thousand years after all. I couldn't assume you felt the same way you did in your first life before I cost you everything. Especially with Elena's hate clouding your emotions."

"_I'm_ Elena," she bites, rising bristled, gone prickly. "And I still hate you."

"Ah, yes, yet you love me as well."

"Stop saying that," she growls. "I was desperate. You don't need to rub my face in it."

"That's not my intent."

"And when I said _both_, let's be clear, I meant Ansel and—"

"And who?" he cuts in, eyes intense on her face, searching her inside, brow quirked.

She smacks back with a harsh exhale against her chair, fingers gripping the edge of the table, resisting the urge to run away. "Tatia. Obviously. The part of me that is Tatia. The part of me that is Elena still hates you. She wants no part of that attachment. Just because I can stomach being around you now, just because I've made peace with you and we're some kind of alliance, that doesn't mean Elena loves you. Elena can never love you."

"I would never suggest such a thing," Klaus deadpans, amusement ticking at the corners of his mouth and the mocking sparkle of his eyes, fair brows lifting as he watches her work through her headache inducing self-aware confusion. "No need to be so defensive, my dear."

"Can we just stop with the love stuff? It's unnecessary, right? I thought we understood that. Why are you messing things up in my head again?"

"Because I enjoy watching you flounder," he retorts. But that isn't all it is. That's not really the heart of it at all. "What should be so simplistic, the essence of who you are on the very basest conscious level, so happens to be the most disconcerting unanswered question you've ever faced. It had always been prevalent, with the nature of the doppelgänger, yet you've found new heights, Elena. And I do so take pleasure from making you retest your boundaries."

"You're evil," she says darkly, but without venom. Almost playful.

"How will you ever find certainty if I don't push you?" he challenges, leaning forward across the tabletop, his forearms set down in front of him. "_Tatiana_, _Elena_. Who are you? Who do you love? What is it you _want_? Do you even know what you _need_?"

"I know that glint in your eye," she counters archly, matching his posture, their faces close. "Don't think I can't see what you're playing at. Why don't you come out and say it?"

"I haven't a clue what you mean, lover."

"Oh, yes, you do. Quit with the games, Niko. You aren't going to manipulate me. If you want something from me, then _take it_. I'll stop you if I feel like it, I promise."

"You've grown quite a lot since we parted," he says, smiling like that pleases him immensely. "Is this new phase the college years or the permanent new you, I wonder?"

Eyes squinted, head tilted, grin sly and sensual, obliging his direction, "Do I seem different? _Adult_ enough for you? I really have grown into my own skin. Suppose I went a little depressingly wild after purgatory. I _was_ a teenager, you realize. And freshly alive after a thousand years of desolate stasis." She laughs, a soft raspy huff, but it's only funny because the other option is a psychotic break. "These days, I'm less haunted by everything and more liable to admit when I want something. I honestly can't tell you what spurred the change. I'm just not seeing everything as such a big deal anymore."

"Well, I appreciate the growth."

"Do you?"

"I do."

Once the dust settles on that assertion, their ironic fully loaded détente of building tension bursts like an overpressurized floodgate. The rest of the compound eerily still, Klaus and Elena meet across the table in a sudden simultaneous surge of undeniable urgency. Arm dropping to polished wood and lace, his fingers wrap her wrist resting there, snatch it suddenly, give it a jerk that has her chair knocking out from under her as she's yanked to her feet. Sweeping china from his way, pulling her across the tabletop, crashing together in a rushed wild kiss, bodies coming swiftly flush, tangling and striving, rough and frantic as she lands in his lap.

Fingers pressed to his jawline, she kisses him hungrily, hard and fast and delving deep with greedy possessiveness, other hand carding through his sandy hair as his arm bands across the underside curve of her ass and hoists her higher against him, crushed tighter, friction killing her, driving him mad. They tear at each other's clothes and claw into their skin, grasping muscle and soft curves and hard planes and wet taut heat pulsating between them, Klaus surging out of his seat with her and slamming down hard onto the table, cracking antique wood. Reaching a peak of something between them, a spark kept banked too long releasing into an explosion, the truth ignored and shackled in lies and avoidance. A visceral need, an archaic imperative, original sin. Love. Lust. Heat. Ice. Want. Need. Hate. Comfort. Guilt. Joy. Shame. Freedom. It's all there. Ripping at the seams of their confines, yearning out of the locked boxes buried deep in the abyss in each of them, reaching for one another amidst the war, blood, fog, death, pain, family, strife, betrayal, lies, complications.

All the words that came before were meaningless. This is all that means anything.

Nothing else matters.

They go from the table to the wall, lifting up, swinging around, smacking back. The stone splinters under her spine, under the force of their impact, his strength unchecked now that she's no longer so humanly fragile, so breakable as before. They crash back and she's pinned against his fiercely hard body and the stone is cracking up towards its ceiling supports. From the wall, they make it across the atrium in a blur and halfway up the stairs. A step snaps beneath them. They whirl and stumble onto the landing wraparound, down the corridors, leaving wreckage in their wake. There was always wreckage in their wake. Epic devastation. It cuts across this house the Originals called home so many years until they finally end up in the master's suite.

* * *

><p><em>Damon kisses her. He <em>kisses_ her. Like her day hadn't been baffling enough, strict shock and stress and tears and gore and panic and heartache and plain exhaustion as the sun goes down and she finds herself scrubbing hybrid blood off her foyer floor, unable to quite get the red out of her crimson tinted hands as she rakes flesh off into the kitchen sink. Alaric almost died and Jeremy decapitated a man on their threshold and Klaus held her while she cried and actually apologized for endangering her brother in his stupid scheme against Stefan and admitted to having made a mistake, actually, literally, that happened, and then she came home to clean up the leftover mess of his hybrid and figure out what to do about this brewing war between her estranged homicidal boyfriend and her past life's equally homicidal one true love. And then she's discussing this problem with said homicidal boyfriend's slightly less homicidal at the moment brother and saying goodnight and then suddenly he's turning around and storming back up the stained porch steps. He takes her face in his hands and says, "If I'm gonna feel guilty about something, I'm gonna make it good." And he kisses her._

_It's certainly not the strangest thing to happen to her today, but Elena can't take anymore. She just said goodbye to her brother, shipping him off to Denver to make him escape this maze of never-ending peril, because even though she believes Klaus's word that he won't go after Jeremy again, she's sick of putting him in danger. She learned a second ago that Stefan isn't as far gone as she thought, that he can still be pulled back from the edge, but she hasn't a clue how to go about accomplishing that, only that she can't give up on him. No more than she could give up on Niklaus._

_There is too much whirring in her head for Damon to do this to her tonight. Navigating the minefield that is Damon Salvatore's feelings is treacherous. Last time she rejected him, she got her little brother's neck snapped. And even though she likes to think he's grown, and she's let that go, if not forgiven him, it's still in her mind. If she'd had Tatia with her back then, he'd be dead right now. She'd have torn him apart with her bare hands, vampire or not, even without the wolf inside. So that colors things. It's all so overly complicated, every little thing trying to deal with life these days is just freaking exhausting._

_She doesn't have the energy for this right now. Klaus took too much._

_So Elena stands there and lets herself be kissed. She doesn't respond, doesn't stop him, just stands there. Literally. Her eyes follow him when he pulls away and walks down the path but that's literally all she can manage._

_And then the night's still not over, because she's cornered again._

_The last thing she needs after kissing Damon on the front porch is to turn around and see Klaus at the edge of the house. _Think of the devil and he shall appear_. All she can do is heave another tired sigh. Defeated. Resigned to the chaos of life._

_Normally, she might jump, startle, hand to her heart, but tonight she just stares. Interrupts before he can react to what he's just witnessed. "It's been a long day, Nik. Go home."_

_Leant against a white column, he's the picture of smug casual, amused and knowing and completely full of shit, because his knuckles are tight at the end of loosely hung arms carefully relaxed at his sides. A big bad wolf edge to his smile, he says, "Wanted to tuck my girl in safe. What's so wrong with that?"_

_"__Stop it," she sighs tiredly, looking away. Pushing smooth dark hair behind her ear as she licks her lips and scans the quiet darkness for signs of life. Signs of danger. "I'm definitively not in the mood for the back and forth, okay? No banter, no mocking, no threats. And no fine line walking either. Just go away."_

_"__You wound me, beloved."_

_Elena rolls her eyes at this. Steps up the top riser towards the open front door. "Rebekah?"_

_"__What about her?"_

_"__How did she take it?" she asks._

_He had backed off using Jeremy to force Elena's hand on the whole sticky Stefan matter, and in her begrudging gratitude of that, she'd given a peace offering. She'd shown him where Rebekah's daggered body had been locked away in the Salvatore root cellar, warning him that she wouldn't be happy with him when she woke, because Elena had told her how he'd killed their mother when he first found out what she'd done to Tatia, handing her over to the coven. Rebekah was hurt and betrayed that he'd lied all this time, convincing her it was Mikael who murdered Esther. And if he hadn't tried to murder her brother earlier in the day, the look on his face when she'd confessed this would've made her turn back, would've made her melt and wrap him in her arms until the pain became bearable. But he had arranged for a man to run her brother over in the street, so Elena had walked out._

_"__I haven't woken her yet."_

_"__But you will, won't you?" And at his hesitation, she turns half chiding, half imploring him. "Don't let her miss any more centuries because you're afraid of what she'll say."_

_Exasperated, indulgent, he exhales and glances away, pushing off the column and stalking towards her, deceptively idle. "I'll remove the dagger soon, Elena. I promise."_

_Feeling inexplicably abruptly like a cornered rabbit, she edges closer to the open threshold but he circles her wrist and spins her just shy of safety. Then he backs her up against the wall, pressed breathlessly to the weatherboarding, taunting her with the precise easy control of his broader stronger body. And she slips out a breathy truthful, "Niko."_

_"__Stefan is a better choice, you realize," he informs her, condescending taunting smirk on his lush red lips. "If you must dally with a Salvatore while you're denying who you are."_

_"__I'm not doing this. We've gone around enough for one day. Back off."_

_He spreads his fingers and splays them against white weatherboard on either side of her head to trap her in, as if she wasn't trapped enough by the blockade of his imposing frame. Sliding one knee between her legs, his hips pressing in against hers when her breath catches sharply in her throat, his thigh a strong tantalizing pressure against her core. "I'll step back if you admit you're lying to yourself. That this is a waste of time, this fight you're putting up to pretend to be something you're not, pretend to want things you don't want."_

_He stokes her up as his husky whispered words caress her skin, her mind, her heart, speaking to subconscious, molding her mood the way he prefers. He stokes her up until she's got her eyes squeezed shut and her head tipped back and lips fallen parted on soundless strangled noise and her breath is coming in uneven pants as she's grinding down against his thigh almost involuntarily. Fingers bunched painfully in the corded muscle of his shoulders as he gets her off, his eyes going golden black with arousal, with animal need, fangs coming out, blond bent head burying in her neck. He feeds from her throat and she bucks, a stifled cry leaving her lips, needy and helpless and full of shame and torn. Guttural. He tries to wrench her clothes out of the way with deft hands prying at her body and fuck her thoroughly once she climaxes, winding tight and shuddering apart with a small sudden violence, unraveling limply against him. But even through her taut dizzy distraction, Elena shoves him back and shields herself. Shakes off the daze to come to her senses with forcible stubbornness._

_She shoves him off and goes into the house, where he's not invited, turning back on the safe side of the threshold to meet his disquieted stare. Saying carefully, still quaking, "We agreed, remember?"_

_Klaus growls in frustration, slamming up against the invisible barrier for just a second, lapse in control a split second thing that he reels in quick and eases backward. Not a thing he'd admit to lightly, how badly she undoes him. "We agreed I would allow you space to grow. Yes. I remember." It's tightly said, unhappily acknowledged, but he doesn't negate it. He casts one last searing look up and down her and then takes another symbolic step back. Turns and goes without a fight._

_Trembling from head to toe, Elena closes the door and sinks off weak knees and rubber legs to the hardwood floor, still bloodied from his hybrid's slaughter. She hugs her shins against her chest and concentrates on steadying her breathing. Concentrates on forgetting the unfulfilled tingling intoxication of desire he stirs so indomitably through her with the slightest influence. It doesn't work, she can never forget that, never banish the want, not now that she remembers him as Tatia, not now that she _is_ Tatia, but she'll never stop trying. She just can't imagine ever giving up that hopeless fight._

* * *

><p>It takes every ounce of dutiful willpower in her to push past the boneless melted basking in afterglow and slip out of Klaus's bed. She leaves him sleeping deep behind her as she pulls on her shirt, her slacks, tries to smooth down her <em>just fucked<em> hair, padding silently down the hall to where Elijah waits.

Checking on the stoic self-sacrificing Original by knocking tentatively, entering when he has nothing to say, no dismissal nor greeting. By sighing sadly when she sees him standing there near the window, lost in his head, letting the haunting overtake him. By sitting cross-legged on a leather ottoman in his room, waiting for him to speak, to be ready to acknowledge her presence. Patience is the greatest virtue, one she has in spades, from Elena's old soul and from Tatia's hard garnered millennia of experience.

She isn't sure if Hayley would be a help or a hindrance, but it's irrelevant because Hayley is off dealing with her runaway wolves in the bayou. Avoiding her less tangible problems, Elena might guess. _Their problems_.

They discuss their missed chances at something great, first with Tatia then again with Elena, when he at last pulls from his somber reflection enough to include her in it. "By the time we met, you were too far gone over my brother to ever really give me the time of day," he tells her softly. Inflectionless. "But Elena was different. If I hadn't been so burned by Katerina, if I had seized that radiant ray of hope when it first found me, perhaps I could have won your heart most of all. Before any of this."

"I was in love with Stefan when we met," she counters quietly, not unkindly. Still sitting with her legs crossed and her compassionate eyes on the line of his shoulders, his back turned to her even now, his shadowy face reflected in the glass of the window. "It was a Traveler spell drawing us together, Stefan and I, but I can't pretend it wasn't a good love." Hands resting in her lap, she pulls at a loose thread idly on the hem of her sleeve, old comfort coming to her as she recalls that time in her life. The safety, security, simplicity, despite all the building troubles on her horizon. "Even then, though, I felt the pull I always have to you, Elijah. Even then, I loved you. Or at least cared deeply."

That's true enough, not just a mercy for him. Elena at seventeen getting to know this strange ancient man of sophistication and honor inside a monster did feel the attraction, that constant inevitable feeling of being drawn to him the way she was to Klaus later on, the way she felt fond of him despite his betrayals, felt compelled to follow him. She denied it, never let herself feel these things, admit these things, act on them without a good rational excuse she could justify to herself and her friends. But it was there. It was truth.

"I don't know that this matters now, that it should have any consolation, but Tatia loved you truly from the beginning. It's not right, the way you speak of me, of back then. I couldn't betray Niklaus, I couldn't love you more, that's true. But it was never unrequited, Elijah. I _always_ saw you." She hesitates, not sure if she should go there. In the end, she finds it's just as inevitable to admit this as it is to feel it, as it always was. "I see you now."

Bypassing this, he inquires, "Traveler spell?"

"To make it more convenient for them, the chances of both doppelgängers always being near each other, two for one style," she answers lightly.

He turns from the window then and regards her intently. Deeply. "You are so brave, and so quiet with it, that I sometimes forget to think of your suffering."

Her half smile is wry, humorless, hollow. "I don't."

"Thank you for saving me, Elena," he says suddenly, properly, hands slid into the pockets of his slacks as he observes her. "And for this. For coming to me tonight because you knew I should not be alone. You are thoughtful and generous, just as I remember you. _Both_ of you."

"Do you want to talk about Hayley yet?" she tests.

"Not yet." Then he says, "I'm glad you found yourself again. It could not have been easy."

"I'm sorry if I hurt you while I was lost," she replies, hands folded together, watching his face carefully for reaction, for giveaways. "It was a dark time for me."

"For us all," he amends, looking away, shadows passing over his expression. "The darkness has yet to recede here, it seems."

"Sunrise will come," she tells him, lightly philosophical, unusually metaphoric, her smile a soft reassuring thing. "It always does." And she watches him watch the skyline.


	11. Part X

_Talking bodies_…

She's a wild heart. Beauty and rage and sweetness, ultraviolet brightness, filled with poison. She is his one true exception. And he'd never tell her so.

But the marks he leaves on her body say it all. They tattoo all the truths he can't speak into her flesh for her to keep forever, even after they fade, because she knows him like no other and can read between his lines. The way he holds her against him is proof.

In bed with Klaus, she's pressed against his ripped torso, fingers loosely laced where his wrist rests on her shoulder, his arm propped under her neck. Sunlight filters in past sheer white drapes across wide tall windows along the long far wall. "Sometimes I miss my wolf so badly," she confesses, nothing of pretext beforehand. Just sharing her thoughts in a random unguarded moment of rare intimacy. Surprising him as he traces calloused fingertips gently over her skin in complicated patterns. "Do you ever let yours out, Niklaus?"

"That's a lot of agony just to lose myself, love."

She turns over to face him, provoked by the idleness of his tone. "You don't _lose_ anything. He's the other half of you. Why couldn't I ever teach you that?" Thoughtfully, ruefully, she adds, "I suppose I've already got too many halves. There wouldn't be room for a wolf."

* * *

><p><em>Back in Mystic Falls, Elena's first stop after her failed treasure hunt is Mikaelson Manor, where she corners Klaus in his drawing room. The wide vaulted sprawling chamber of books and easels and towering windows letting in watery grey light. He's alone and she's restless, feeling her defeat, looking for trouble. For preoccupation. Tries to slam him up against the shelving in the library, hardcover first editions falling all around them, and tries to fuck him. Fingers fisted in the fabric of his cashmere sweater, pinning him back, a mean slash across her lips in the form of a smile at his amused bewilderment. She wedges a knee between his legs and arches into him, raising up for a kiss, baring her teeth when his head pulls back.<em>

_He is surprised, and then he is indulgent, undecided whether to be pleased or exasperated. "What are you doing?" he asks, eyebrow raised._

_"__Going for the hat trick trifecta," she quips. Her knee crooks higher, presses firmer, her hips pushing in against his. With Elijah, she was soft and pliable, whispering allures to ensnare him against his better judgment, knowing that her tantalizing promises were empty but wanting to reach for them regardless. With Rebekah, she was honest, unconcerned and unmasked about who she is and what she was playing at. With Klaus, she starts rough. Blunt. Ready to get to it. No need for window dressing. Just two animals coming together in a familiar fantastic crash. If he'll cooperate. She doesn't see why he wouldn't, because it's Niklaus, and this is exactly the approach he wouldn't be able to deny. But he always does get kicks from being oppositional. He so does enjoy vexing her._

_"__Come again?"_

_"__That's the plan."_

_He catches her wrists when they tear his shirt open and stills her. "Explain yourself."_

_Elena exhales, thwarted but not defeated, not struggling from his banded bruising fingers. "Well, see, I had your brother last night. And I had your sister the night before that." Her grin is positively evil. But sultry too. "Now, I'm thinking it'd be cute to roll this into a straight three day Mikaelson marathon. You know what I mean, don't you, Nik? You have a problem with helping me finish out the set?"_

_"__Normally, no." But his fingers don't loosen and his body doesn't grow any more receptive to her brash advance. Frown between his brow, he blinks, comes back to what got him stuck. "What do you mean, you had my sister?"_

_Smirk widening, eyes gleaming, she says patronizingly low, "What do you think I mean?"_

_Hardening, fingers flexing so tight around her wrists that it makes her hiss, then trill into husky masochistic laughter, Klaus growls, "I think you've lost your mind."_

_"__Just my heart."_

_"__Then you won't care that I take a rain check."_

_"__That's disappointing," she drawls, pulling back, not looking particularly disappointed. Yanking her arms from his grasp, she smoothes down her skirt where it'd ridden up and tucks her wavy hair behind her ears, adjusting to the change in plans, searching for another route to expel this excess energy, to cope with the passive-aggressive aggravation of having failed at what she'd set out to do and having zero appealing prospects for what to do next._

_"__That's an emotion," he throws back._

_"__Whatever."_

_Eyes rolling, breath huffing out, Elena spins away. The world is colored differently with this new version of her, but his gaze still penetrates, still shivers down her spine and settles to leave her uncomfortable. He still makes her feel inadequate, impatient, in need of something, some thirst she can never quite quench, some hunger that will never be sated. Dismisses him into the apathetic category of no more worth._

_As she walks out, his vaguely affronted voice chases after. "You did wicked things with my sister and didn't bother to include me? You really have gone to the dark side."_

_He's not serious. He's mocking her, she's pretty sure. But she just grins. Keeps sashaying._

* * *

><p><em>Dark star<em>. That's what that is. She's staring up as if from under a thick lapping film of water at the black sparkling sky. There is one light in particular she's fixated on, feeling drawn in like a premonition or by fate, some sixth sense telling her it's there, letting her see the dark unseeable. She's reaching but can never make it, never stop reaching for the impossible, for the dark star somewhere up there waiting for her. And then she realizes it's more than that. She's sinking even lower from where she started. She's being pulled down. Drowning in the rich blue deep, someone's arm around her waist, dragging her down. His arm hugging her tight, taking her forever away, too deep into the dark, into the abyss, damning her downward. She can't get free of him. There's no escape.

Elena tears herself out of the fragmented dream with a ragged gasp, flinging violently upward from the pillow, from the tangled sheets, sweat and heavy breaths, her heart racing in her chest. But then she's quieting, realizing where she is, remembering the heat of him beside her and the weight of his leg over hers and the touch of his body along her side. She puts a hand over her mouth as she calms her breathing, twisting where she sits, looking down at Niklaus as he sleeps on his stomach, head turned, one arm under the pillow, the other splayed loosely on the mattress where her body had just been. She pulls her fingers from her chapped lips and lays them into the spaces between his own, sliding her wrist against his palm, her other hand drifting tentatively along his bristled jawline. It falls past his ear through his mussed sandy hair and then down to linger over one shoulder blade, mapping the triangle ink etched into the flesh there, lowering herself gingerly back down to bed.

It's been so long since she's allowed herself this. Let herself be here with him like this in a way she hasn't had, a peace she hasn't had, not since a thousand years and a dozen of her own deaths went by, keeping them ever apart across a vast … _something_.

She longs for this. Even when she has it, she longs for it. To keep it. She's no longer a person to be confined by shame and fear. There is so much to consider, to navigate, so many factors and reasons to not get into this epic mess now, but she finds herself here and she doesn't want to just wait anymore. _Just wait_ for the right time, when she feels ready, when she feels equipped to tackle the hardship and the complication and the impossibility of being with him. To tackle _him_, his problems, his barriers, his possession.

Elena used to be so afraid of admitting she loved him. It was Tatia's love, but she was Tatia, and so it was her own, and that fact was what she'd spent three years hiding so desperately from. And the _want_, the ancient want she had, always craving him, never escaping it, that was Tatia's too but she was terrified of finding out it was hers as well, just hers, because Elena Gilbert could not live with herself if she couldn't blame that on Tatia. So she held fiercely onto the excuse that if Tatia had never merged with her, she would've never felt that way. She would've never had any weakness for him. Whether it's true or not is a question she's only recently matured enough to even consider. And anyway, that was a qualifier that never really mattered. What if, what if, what if, it's all conjecture, all hypothetical. Tatia _did_ merge with Elena and there was no escape for how she felt because of it. Pretending otherwise was just wasting time. But he was right in the very beginning, she did need time from him to grow, before she could accept that, before she could come to terms with this new woman, neither solely Tatia or Elena. They both had to adjust to what it was like, something they could never prepare for, this unprecedented evolution of two similar yet vastly separate human beings becoming one.

She's used to it now. She's accepted who she is. And she's not afraid of him.

Maybe she's more Tatia than Elena these days, or maybe Elena has grown up, figured out what she wants, decided it doesn't matter whether that want came from herself or from taking on Tatia's legacy. Whatever the complications, whatever the cause, she's here now and she likes right where she is. She's going to hold onto it for awhile. She's going to try to test the waters with all the things he hasn't said.

"Klaus," she whispers, turning onto her side. She presses into his back, breasts flattening to the muscle there, and folds her arms across his shoulders, two fingers toying at the nape of neck as they twist in the short wavy strands of his hair there. She rests her chin on him and her lips caress the space below his ear as she murmurs. "Klaus, wake up, will you?"

"Why?" he mumbles into the pillow.

"Because I have things to say. I want to explore something."

"Exploration." Lifting his lashes, he peers at her from over his shoulder with a groggy gaze, sleepy and satisfied, idly indulgent. "Haven't we spoken enough, love? Round and round, we go, round and round, lover, but nothing happens."

"What's supposed to happen?"

"Useful things," he says absently, one hand rubbing tiredly at his head. "You and I have no need for words. We'll explore tomorrow."

"Wake up," she needles, and then her tongue darts out and she catches the rim of his ear between her teeth. "_Klaus_."

"Very well," he sighs, fingers finding the sensitive spot of her side and squeezing to make her body jerk in on itself as the ticklish reflex spasms. The jolt gets her off his back enough for him to flip over, pushing upwards in bed until his shoulders rest on the headboard, chin dropped to his chest, one hand falling to his abdomen, other scooping her up again, corralling her to twine against his side. She rests her cheek on his chest and closes her eyes, listening to his heart beat, rising and falling softly with his breath. His fingers settle in the dip of her lower spine, warm and rough but cupping naturally. "What's on your mind then, sweetheart?"

"Us."

"Us?"

"We're a combustible combination, aren't we?" she asks. "I mean, we haven't been able to get close for too long without self-destructing."

"That's certainly one interpretation," he answers enigmatically.

"I know I go from really certain about something to really uncertain about something else, related or even the same, but I've never done this before and I'm full of doubt."

"Done what, love?"

"_This_. Taken this risk. Jumped this far."

Blue eyes going skyward, he lets out a sigh of soft exasperation. "We've done nothing we haven't done before, beloved. Countlessly."

"It's different this time. Can't you feel it?"

"I feel it," he whispers, almost to himself, resting his mouth against the crown of her head. "You think too much about things that need no thinking of. You and I, my dear, we're inevitable. We're a natural imperative. There's nothing to consider."

After awhile, she props onto an elbow, palm on her temple, searching his face. Finally says, "You're right. This thing between us, this timeless tether, it's forever, isn't it? We just keep going down in flames, but we're still forever."

"Precisely."

"So say it then."

"Say what?" he questions, eyebrow cocked. The sleepy rumpled softness to him makes her able to let her guard slip, ignoring their careful construct, risking disaster in the hazy afterglow of being with each other at last.

Elena tells him, "Say that you want me here."

"You know that I do."

"No, I don't. I know you want me alive, but I don't know you actually want me _here_. Now. With you. You were weirdly chill about the Traveler border spell and you didn't try to stop me from going before. I _don't_ know. Do _you_?"

Pads of his fingers a grounding pressure against her back, Klaus looks down at the girl and she stares back, waiting. After a moment of studying her carefully, he decides, "No."

Tensing in surprise, hurt flashes across her face. Disbelief. Then wounded acceptance drops like a weighted shroud over her. Elena pushes upright, pulling instinctively away from the man, shutting down. She wraps a loose sheet around her but he catches her arm before she can get off the bed and blur out.

"I don't want you anywhere near my mother," he continues, tugging her back around so fast she lands across his lap, her side crushed to his chest, her hip to the rippled muscle of his abs as he cradles her jaw in one hand, his other releasing the bend of her arm to snake through a gap in the sheet and grip the curve of her thigh. Faces so close, his voice goes too low for anyone to ever overhear as he admits, "I'd rather you were with Hope."

The shock of that, the unfurling explosive burst of emotion that causes inside of her, it's too much to express. And because a chick flick reaction would just make him mad, make him retreat from her, she swallows back the sudden surge, pushes aside the young Elena impulse to melt, and quickly into the loaded quiet before things can get awkward counters, "Rebekah is keeping her safe. I'm of more use here."

"I don't want you in the same city as Esther," he tells her, "but if she plans to use you in her schemes then it won't make a different whether you're in Mystic Falls or Antarctica."

"Please tell me you didn't send your infant there," she jokes.

As if she hadn't interrupted, "That's the only reason I've kept you here. In case she does have intentions towards you, I'd rather you close by where I can reach you in time."

"So you want me with you?" she stubbornly persists.

"It doesn't matter."

"Of course you'd think that," she mutters, frustration taking over. She grabs his wrist and tries to pull his fingers down from her cheek but he grabs her face firmer and pulls her into him until their brows touch and her sigh brushes his parted lips.

"Because you will say the same thing you said the first time," he explains, husky voice rough, losing its lilt. "You can't stay."

"You don't know _what_ I'll say."

"I do," he whispers, and then his mouth catches hers.

Electric desire sparks, having simmered and climbed, triggered in a sudden urgent explosion of immediate need. No longer deniable. His fingers scrunch against her face, tangled in her hair, tugging as his kiss deepens, turning fierce and hungry and devouring. He wrenches the sheet up out of the way, twisting it in one fist to her hips as she grabs onto his shoulders, nails digging in, hurried needy noises thrumming in her throat. She arches against him, pulling up onto a knee, other leg moving out of the way, hooking over his hip until she's straddling his lap and his lips are grazing down her jawline, finding the vulnerable stretch of her neck to make her head tip back before he flattens a palm to the small of her back and yanks her flush, slamming inside. Elena jerks with the suddenness, the violent thrust of impact, deadly sensation hitting her all at once like a car crash. She gasps out a strangled cry and her eyes snap open wide. He doesn't bite into her skin but keeps his face buried in her throat, his hands settling around her waist as she quivers and shudders and clutches at him, arms winding bruisingly tight around his shoulders, starting to move. Easing off to a taut arch, dropping back down so they kiss to the hilt, rising up again for another thrust. Riding him with short jagged motions, going deep and vehement at a slow but harsh tempo, a torturous rhythm of physical and emotional intensity.

* * *

><p><em>Getting hot and heavy with Stefan for the first time since forever. Since before he left town with Klaus, before he returned a different person, before the unsure torturous road along to some sort of redemption, before she died, before she returned. They keep trying to reunite at last and have it be amazing but things keep preventing them. Vomiting up blood in the woods, struggling through despair, fighting off her feelings for Niklaus. She's a vampire and the Elena half of her finds it not all that bad but Tatia can't believe this is what she's become. She wants Stefan to be able to make her feel better, wants to reassure him with more than hollow words, but things keep getting in their way.<em>

_Not tonight. Tonight she is drunk and on a giddy high from telling off Rebekah and riding Titanic style on the back of his rushing bike and everything is fleetingly fantastic. So she kisses him with everything she's got. She shoves him down to the bed, straddling his waist, sucking at his tongue, shivering as he runs his hands up her undulating back. Lifting her shirt, stoking up a biting lust, stroking silken dark sheets of too long hair past her shoulder as he studies her face with his typical reverence. Her eyes start to go red, fangs extending, hunger stirring, and her hand is around his throat before she realizes what she's doing, pinning him roughly back, but he meets her visceral want with his own vehemence, flipping her around, slamming her hard down beneath him. She spreads her thighs, hips arcing into him, legs locking around him. She's loving this, lost in her new nature and familiar biology, urging him on, when he pulls up and suddenly it's not Stefan on top of her at all._

_With a scream, Elena thrusts at him before she can stop herself. A knee jerk jolt of shock and dutiful denial that has him stumbling off the bed from her force. One second, his hands are all over her and his weight is bearing her down into the mattress and it's Klaus and then he's standing there in breathless overwrought confusion at the foot of the bed looking at her like she's crazy and it's Stefan. It was always Stefan. She doesn't know why she's seeing Klaus. She wants Stefan. Just Stefan. He's the safe one, the healthy one, the one that makes her happy and he's the one she chose. She chooses him over and over again. So she shouldn't be seeing Klaus. Whatever history so impossible to overcome, she's put it aside. She's Elena. She loves Stefan. Stefan, Stefan, Stefan, Stefan, Stefan—_

_"__Elena, your neck," he exclaims worriedly, quietly, reaching for her._

_She holds up a jarring hand, head shaking, but her eyes are going down to her arm because a horrible gnawing pain has set into her bloodstream and she can feel the skin there as if it's boiling and she bites down at the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming. "God," she gasps raggedly, hissing as she tugs the sleeve up and reveals rippled skin. Scared, helpless, "Stefan, it burns."_

_Which is when she realizes. She's been poisoned._

_And then the second realization comes. It comes just about the time he pulls his cell out and turns his back on her. Calling Klaus. She'll die without him._

_"__This is so unfair," she whispers, sinking lower against the headboard, hugging at herself as the acid in her veins intensifies and sweat slicks her clothes. It hurts, so much, and she's not thinking straight. Stefan is still there somewhere, but he's faraway, and she's seeing Klaus on the edge of the bed, feeling the coolness of his hand caressing gently down the line of her throat before it settles on her collarbone like a reassuring weight. "Why am I seeing you?"_

_"__Who else would you see?" he challenges._

_She knows this isn't real. It's a hallucination. Just a stupid fever delusion. So she screws her eyes shut and tries to will him away. That tethering touch on her collar fades away after awhile and the heat becomes agonizing and she's left bereft and hating him for it. She's tried so hard to find balance, to make a decision, to figure out what the hell she wants. What the hell it is she should do. Who she should be. Finally she commits and it feels so … wrong._

_Last time she saw him, she'd just lied to Stefan and thrown blood up all over her funeral dress and said things she regretted when he cornered her behind the chapel and left her feeling horrible and wrecked as she watched him walk away but they needed to be said. Stefan seeing her with him when she first found out he was still alive, seeing her unguarded relief, seeing her clinging to Klaus's neck, he had some valid questions that she just couldn't answer. That truth she's been keeping for so long. Who she is. How she feels. That despite everything, he's not her enemy and that's the ultimate betrayal to everyone she loves. She can never tell them. If they know about Tatia, they'll never accept it. They'll try to separate them, as if she's possessed, and she can't let that happen. She can't let them find out. And without that, all there is to know is the betrayal of Elena having feelings for Klaus. As if it could be that simple._

_Feelings for Klaus. What a joke. It sounds so … moderate. It sounds absurd and laughable in the face of what it is between her and Niklaus. What it has always been._

_The last time she saw him, she told him she was done. She told him she wanted nothing to do with him. That she didn't want his help. That she needed to cut him out like cancer. It was low and awful and she knows viscerally how deep those words wounded, how deep they dug under his skin, carving into the hollows of old scars never healed. And when he's hurt, he gets mean and punishes indiscriminately._

_Now she's dying. And needs his blood to save her. Which is just great. Just fucking brilliant. She can't catch a break, can she?_

_For a minute, for an hour, she sinks into the pain and the fever and her blood on fire and really truly wholeheartedly believes that this is it. She's going to die. Even when she cracks her eyes painstakingly open and sees him standing in the doorway, she still thinks that. It's over. He wouldn't let her die alone. He'd want to be with her as he let her suffer._

_Tatia should've known better. She did know better. But she'd become Elena, and Elena on top of weak feverish belief colors things, so she was convinced this was the end. Poisoned by werewolf venom out of a high school party's keg her first week of being a rotten vampire. Fucking perfect. Poetic._

_Death until now has always been somewhat epic. Sacrificed for the man she loves to bind his curse. Sacrificed by the man she loves to break his curse. Killed by his father protecting the other man she loves. Killed by his sister to save the lot of the vampire race. And now … it's a chugging handstand that gets her. The irony is too much to stomach._

_But then he sweeps in at Stefan's call, looking fine and exasperated, his superior impatience letting her know she doesn't deserve his presence after how she treated him. If she felt better, she'd roll her eyes. This is his version of pouting and it's an absurdly dangerous thing and she can't believe she ever found it endearing._

_Leaning around Stefan, who unconsciously creates himself as an impenetrable wall stood between them, even if he's the one who begged Klaus to come. He looks her over thoroughly in zero hurry and seems only mildly interested as he asks her, "What's the matter, love?"_

_Elena just groans, hardly keeping her eyes open, biting into her bottom lip, curling further into herself. Stefan says tightly, "Werewolf venom. She needs your blood."_

_"__Is that so?" is Klaus's absent return._

_"__Niklaus," she whispers, breathes, face constricted in pain and pleading. It's so quiet either man could've misconstrued its syllables if they'd wanted to._

_"__Stefan, you'll have to excuse us," he declares, dismissing the younger vamp as he steps negligently around him and advances on the bed._

_Frowning strongly, he looks doubtfully from Klaus to Elena and she dips her chin in a faint solemn nod that has him reluctantly leaving, dragging his heels, throwing distrustful glances over his shoulder. That's what she's loved about him from the very beginning. Even when it's against every instinct he has, every fiber of his body, he respects her choices. Whatever they are and however she decides, in spite of how he's affected. He just loves her that much._

_Once he's gone, Klaus breaks from standing toweringly over her, unnerving her, and sinks to the edge of the bed beside her, his hip against her side, his hand palming her crown to lift her up towards him off the headboard. Without a word, he opens his wrist with hybrid teeth and presses the wound between her lips, his potent blood flooding her tongue. She swallows and the fire recedes, the rich warm electrifying taste returning her to life, saving her from the fever and the torment, waking hunger and desire and impossible solace._

_At the first touch of it, she finds her fingers curling over his wrist, her nails latching in so he can't take it away, sucking desperately, drinking him down. He lights her fried nerves bright, soothing and then scintillating, sparing her plenty but never enough. It leaves her aching and hollow and craving. It's never gonna be enough. Just a taste. Tease. Reminder of past things and promises to come that she's been denying herself the option for. It's maddening and she can't seem to give it up, no matter how hard she tries, because something always pulls her back in. Leads her back to him. And she tries to forget, tries to stop, but when he's here and she's feeling him again, there's no pretending. She misses it so damn bad._

_When he ends it, gives her no more, shuts her out, she doesn't try to chase the fix. She sinks breathily low under the covers, shoulder blades to the headboard, and lets her chin dip, eyes hooded from his penetrating stare. "Your sister tried to kill me again."_

_"__Are you sure it was her?" He cocks an eyebrow._

_"__Who else could it be?" she asks, already feeling the creep of dread at the possibility it wasn't Rebekah who laced the keg._

_Klaus just sits, watches her, unsettling the girl, knowing exactly what he's doing._

_She admits, "I didn't think you'd come."_

_He strokes his palm back and forth softly across her lower stomach under the loose blouse, an absent instigating caress, almost subconscious, his fingers curving her hip. "I was tempted to ignore the call."_

_She knows better than to ask, knows it's only asking for trouble, but she perversely can't help herself. "Why did you?"_

_His crystalline gaze never wavers. His expression untouched. "You know why."_

_"__You should go," she says, looking down, pushing herself nervously up to escape his touch. "Stefan's going to have questions."_

_"__Perhaps I should explain the situation," he counters lightly, the threat a stark shock._

_"__Klaus, no," she exclaims softly, breathing it out in horror and desperation at the thought. "You know what will happen if they find out."_

_"__I'd never let them banish Tatia. It's you, Elena, that should be worried."_

_"__Stop it. Please. I can't do this with you right now. Just go."_

_"__As you wish," he murmurs, confusingly softening. His fingers slip shiveringly from her as he rises and turns from her. She watches with a bewildered frown, suspicious of compliance, waiting for the other shoe to drop. She waits with bated breath until he's out the door and Stefan's back in the room with her, braced for thorns, for the inevitable implosion that comes with hurting Niklaus, with handing him ammunition, but it never comes._

* * *

><p>"You still love Tatia."<p>

"Of course," he answers, automatic, without missing a beat, his fingertips not hitching as they trace circles over her back, his arm hooked around her, holding her at his side.

Lowering her lashes, she won't meet his eyes as she questions, "Could you ever love Elena?" And at his hesitation, she fearlessly continues, "Not her. Not me. Just Elena."

"I don't know," he admits after a heavy moment. Arm lax around her, his fingers drift off the edge of her back. "Perhaps. If things were different, in another life, perhaps."

"Without Tatia?"

"Perhaps," is all he says again. Then, "You could say the same for me."

"Yeah." She sighs. Closes her eyes. "I guess."

"Can you see a life for yourself here?" he questions quietly, staring thoughtfully off across the sprawling room. "In New Orleans."

"Well, I've already fallen so behind at school, I'll probably never be able to recover. I can't go back to Mystic Falls, even if I hadn't burned the only home I had there down, and the Salvatore boarding house was never mine. It's not _home_ to me. Whitmore is something I'm still trying for, but it's not a good fit and I know it. I couldn't keep up with my classes and internship while I'm always running around dealing with the latest supernatural drama."

"You could transfer to university here," he suggests. "Let me handle the _supernatural drama_ while you focus on your studies."

"Wouldn't _that_ be lovely," she drawls, heavily sardonic.

"I'm serious, sweetheart."

She lifts her head to see his face, search it intently, her ironic smile becoming sincere at the uncharacteristic earnestness she finds there. "It's definitely something to think about."

Instead of pursuing his case or backtracking, he lets it fall by the wayside, all that needed to be said having been, each of their intentions made clear, the future wide open. He lifts her hand off his stomach and brings it to his lips, canines extending, eyes bleeding to black and gold as he pierces the flesh, drinking from her wrist. With a quick intake of breath, Elena coils tense where she's tangled with him, twisting and rising slowly, fingers of her left hand gripping the top edge of the headboard above him, coming to rest astride his thighs. The sting, the heat, the pull as he draws off her and the tang of blood scenting the air makes her hungry. She lets the bloodlust run free as it likes, fangs coming out, her own eyes turning red, veins around them crawling along the surface. Long blond lashes lifting, his monstrous gaze strikes her, locks them in a moment of feverishly intense connection.

"Beautiful," she murmurs, rasping almost druggedly, and then breaks the stare by going in quick and latching onto his throat, her cheek pressed against the underside of his jaw, her teeth in his skin, dizzyingly powerful hybrid blood on her tongue. Flooding her mouth.

When they've each drank their full, a useless exchange but an exquisite high, she pulls away and falls aside, stretching languorously out on her back. He wipes the blood from his chin with a thumb and licks his lips, blue eyes watching her drift, reaching for her with long artistic fingers, impossibly strong and shockingly brutal but utterly gentle on her body.

"Could you love Hayley?" she wonders coyly, not randomly, playing at provoking him.

Klaus grins. "If things were different, in another life, perhaps." But then he gets serious and he hoists her, falling into the crook of his elbow, being pulled across him, halfway over his torso. "She reminds me of you, you know. She has fire, a strong spirit, a kind heart. There is hurt and viciousness inside of her, but she's pure." He trails his fingers teasingly slow down the line of her spine as she lays atop him. "You've always bothered me, Elena. From the moment that we met. To answer your earlier question, yes, I think I could have. I swore to myself that I would never let love make me weak again. With Katerina, it was easier. She was nothing like Tatia. Nothing like anything I would want. But with you..."

"Yes?" She's lying still, perfectly achingly still, breathless even. Listening.

"The more you reminded me of her, the more I resented you for it. The way you stood up for the people you loved, the way you fought for them by sacrificing yourself, it was exactly like her. Just as she had and I hated you for it. I was grateful, but I hated you. The less cruel that I found myself wanting to be with you, all the harsher I treated you."

Losing the tension of anticipation, she buries her face in his chest. "I know, Niko."

His arms around her tighten reflexively. "Could you, Elena? After everything we've done to one another, could you truly love someone like me?"

"I remember you when you were innocent."

"But I'm _not_ innocent, Elena." So abruptly he becomes whiplash harsh. "That man Tatia had loved is dead. He's been gone a very long time. He's not coming back."

"That's not true. You're still the same person. You've changed. We all have."

"Not Tatia."

"I don't know. Maybe becoming part of me was her change. Maybe we're bleeding over into each other, if there's anything left of who we were separately."

"Is that what you really believe?"

"There've been so many times I thought I'd lost myself. When I lost my parents, when I died and Tatia brought me back, when I went over that bridge and became a vampire, when I lost my brother and rejected humanity, when Katherine took over my body. And wasn't _that_ a trip—me, Tatia, and Katherine, all in one head."

"Glad I missed it."

"I'm not. You knew Katherine better than anyone. You would've seen it wasn't me."

"Such faith in your mortal enemy, my love. If I didn't know better, I'd think _this_ wasn't you," he teases. Hefts her up higher against him until they're chest to chest, face to face, their noses just barely brushing. Both smiling.

"But it is," she whispers, at last turning her head aside, tousled brown curls spilling over all his skin in silken tingling kisses. "I kept thinking I was losing who I am, becoming something I didn't want to be, but the truth is that I might've been changing but I was still me. Still who I'd always been on the inside."


	12. Part XI

_Craven escape_…

"We can't just keep feeding off each other forever, you know. Sometime soon, we're gonna have to actually get out of this bed and find some sustenance," she says, throwing her head back with a throaty laugh as shivers run down her spine and her body spasms at the thrill of his teeth, blunt and human and playful, nipping along the curve of her hip. Wet lips lush to heated skin, shaping his cocky satisfied smile, her hands buried in his rumpled curls. His long rough fingers splaying wide, gripping at the smooth meat of her bent thigh, one knee hooked lazily over his lean shoulder, heel digging into one side of his lower back. "Klaus," she laughs again, swallows, halfheartedly striving to focus. Twists at his hair. "Are you listening to me?"

"We'll go hunting when the sun goes down. I want to show you New Orleans at night, lover. Until then … we have things to occupy our time."

"Bad idea."

"If I give my word to not kill anyone?"

"You won't give your word on that. You never know when the mood will strike," she mocks, recrimination in the sarcastic drawl that ruffles his metaphorical fur and she laughs off. "Fine. We'll go for a Quarter stroll. When the sun goes down…"

* * *

><p><em>The first thing Klaus does once he's out of Tyler's body and back into his own, freed from that damnable coffin, is go looking for Elena. When he snatches her arms and interrogates, Caroline tells him confusedly about the bridge, what Rebekah has done, the transitioning and the hunters. Her news spurs his hostage exchange for his own body into more urgency until his impatience turns to violence he mightn't have resorted to if not for the ever ticking deadline on Elena's life. His first priority is finding the dying doppelgänger.<em>

_But she doesn't know that. She knows he's dead._

_"__I was coming back for you," she tells Stefan, and she's not lying. She thought they were all dying and she wanted to be with him before he was gone. Be with her friends. The only family she has left. It's not a lie. But it's not enough._

_She doesn't want to be a vampire. And she doesn't want to be here without Niklaus._

_Returning to the Other Side now seems like a welcome relief. It's too tempting and she's too tired and it's been too long. She got a second chance, a fresh start, but it wasn't a clean slate and everything has gone too far wrong. She's ready to give up. But Elena loves Stefan. Almost more than anything. So she does try when Rebekah lures the guard in and snaps, "Reach for it, you insufferable Petrova."_

_She tries and tries but she's tired and Klaus is dead and the warm wetness of his pooled blood touches her cold clammy fingers and she just can't pull her arm back in._

_The darkness is soft and oblivious and it swallows her gently._

_Elena is in the cage beside Stefan's at the pastor's farm, Bekah in her own across the aisle, and the blood of the guard's body is pooling on the concrete. Her eyelids are heavy, eyes gritty, burning in her veins and fatigue overtaking everything. Her arm is stretched through the bars, fingertips striving for it, but she just can't reach it. She passes out, pale and weak and dying, and Stefan is yelling her name._

_But then Niklaus comes. He storms in and wrenches the bars out of his way, pulling her up onto his lap as he drops to his haunches, forcing his blood into her mouth, down her sandpaper swollen throat. He's tightly coiled and she feels how pissed he is before she's even aware she's still alive. She wakes, veins surfacing varicose, eyes bleeding red and black, fangs breaking the gums and sinking in hard. Fingers flying up, clutching harsh to his arm, desperate and fervent and unstoppable, she drinks deep. Becoming stronger._

_Klaus's blood shouldn't work, but it does, and she awakens a vampire. Stronger because of the Original blood coursing through her bloodstream, creating her new being, providing the life source. Growl vibrating in her chest, pulling her lips back, driving her teeth in deeper, animalness unfurling like a predator out of hibernation inside her, like her wolf only extremely completely different. She's arching up off the floor into him, chasing that high, pressing in at the burning intoxicating taste, the delicious need. It was this that dragged her out of the water under Wickery Bridge and out of the morgue, this blood, his blood, so she thinks it's only right that of course his blood would bring her to life again._

_Vampire eyes rising. Seeing him. She lets go of his wrist and grasps his face, gaze wide in disbelief and exultation. "You're alive!" she exclaims, breathy in tears._

_Darkly, he says, "You're not."_

_This is exactly what he hadn't wanted to happen. Her blood is useless now. His hybrids are gone forever. She hears it in his voice and sees it in the brief flicker of darkened storm passing across his face before he shuts it down._

_Then she's holding on for dear life, arms locked around his neck, crushing herself to him. She doesn't care how it looks or what it reveals or how it might change things between them, crossing boundaries she worked so hard to construct all this time, obliterating every pretense or complication. "I knew you had to be alive," she murmurs, mouth moving against the warm skin of his neck. He's mad and thinks she's useless and he's going to slaughter people for that but she doesn't care. All she can do is hug him tight. "I begged Bonnie but she said she couldn't." And then once more, "You're alive."_

_It's indescribable. The shock, the joy, the unbearable intensity of need and bliss and pain, mingled together so inextricably. And hope._

_She doesn't care what this unguarded reaction might mean for them all. She doesn't care, she just clings._

_His hands settle on the slope of her waist. "The bitter witch underestimated herself." He has an offhand demeanor, smile loose and words light, but the tension in his body speaks to rage and violence and hurt. It practically vibrates. He detaches her gently from himself and sets her back against the ruined cage bars. He rises, goes to free Rebekah with a smirking irreverent, "Little sister."_

_"__You left me to rot," she snarls, thrusting to her feet from her defeated slump._

_He steps aside, eyes rolling skyward as she shoulders pissily past him, "Only a little while."_

_Elena reaches through the bars to grasp Stefan's hand in impatience, crying in relief and in what she's become, grim and happy. He takes her hand, twines their fingers, but he's looking at her suspiciously, like he's never seen her before. And she knows why. He can't understand the way she wrapped herself around Klaus and clung in such joyous devastation. It reminds her of reality. Secrets and lies and unforgivable truths._

_Before it can weigh her down too far, the tide shifts and she pulls away._

_"__Do you hear that?" she wonders, hearing the violence outside, volume fluctuating in her ears as her new enhanced vampire senses waver. Arguing and bitterness against shame and utter guilty desolation. Broken glass and a punch. Instinct drives her forward, lifting her quick into motion, acting without thinking. She leaves Stefan, leaves Klaus, thoughtlessly surging to quicksilver speed, blurring out of the barn. Rushing to tackle Damon away from where he's got poor Matt pinned. Eyes reddening, yelling through gritted teeth, "I died for him!"_

_"__Elena—"_

_"__Don't ever touch him."_

* * *

><p>Three days. Three days is all they get. To be happy, to be at peace, locked in their own little world of reacquainting, of finding emotional honesty unbarred. Putting aside all the troubles and threats looming on the horizon, if only for a week, a day, a moment. Turned out it was three. Then their time was up. Back to reality. Back to misery.<p>

It's Damon. Of all the people, of all things, to end their détente, it's Damon bloody Salvatore, back from the dead and on the doorstep of Mikaelson Manor. Klaus thought he couldn't despise the man any more than he already had. He was wrong.

"What are you doing here?"

"What is _she_ doing here?" the Salvatore counters harshly, trying to stride right past Klaus on his way to finding Elena. _Looking for her, can't wait anymore, need to see her._ Desperation to the highest level.

It's his misfortune he crosses paths with the Original before he can. He steps into his way before he can get past the courtyard. Lays a hand to the vamp's chest to stop him. "She doesn't want to see you, mate."

"She doesn't remember loving me. She's confused right now."

His casual hand on Damon's chest harshens and his razor sharp smile is friendly and deadly all at once. Voice going low, dangerous, he replies, "She's exactly the way she wants to be. It was the choice she made. _She doesn't love you_."

"Yeah, well, we'll see how long that lasts." He tries to shove by Klaus, shrugging his hold off him with a tug to his leather jacket, but the hybrid catches him by the nape, an effortless arc of one arm sending Damon backwards. As he skids, he yells out, "_Elena_! I know you're here. I need to see you!"

Impatience in the thinning of his lips, Klaus plants a hand back to the vampire's chest and walks hard, forcing the uninvited guest out of the courtyard, past the main entrance, out onto the dark deserted street of the Quarter before he drops the pressure and settles back into a confident laziness. Pupils dilating, he catches Damon's eye and says firmly, "Don't come near Elena again unless you've been requested. Are we clear?"

"We're clear," he answers, but he's not himself anymore. Expression going slack, Damon gets clouded on why he came, why it was so necessary to see her, to need her, and he steps backward with a hazy confused shake of his head. "Fine," he tells the hybrid. "I'll wait."

And he compels him to go away, those words haunting his brain as he heads back inside, trying to feel victorious and resolved, those words digging in like the seed of destruction. It pulls on his doubt and insecurity and makes the desperation he's always held for her that much more difficult an obsession to resist. _I'll wait. I'll wait. I'll wait. She's confused. Confused. We'll see how long that lasts._ It eats at him.

When he comes back in, he finds her leaning on the wall, holding lightly to the corner of it, half hidden around the edge, head tipped, expression uncertain. Her fingers are rubbing like it's an absent tick up and down the coarse surface where she clings. He stops when he sees her there because he thinks he's in trouble. But she just smiles weakly. Whispers, "Thanks."

Relaxing, Klaus sidles up, reclaiming his casualness. "Thought you'd be mad, love."

"I would be," she tells him, wetting her lips, turning with him to walk side by side inwards, "but I like who I am now." Looking at the ground, soft and reflective, "I don't know who that girl was that loved him. I don't know if I'll like her."

He can't say he's not relieved.

* * *

><p><em>She's infected. That has to be it. That's why she's seeing him. Quarantined in the abandoned Whitmore dormitory, reading obsessively through Katherine's Elena Journals, nose bleeding, seeing visions that pretend to be memories, living out her every worst nightmare of Katherine in her body, being her, and no one knows, no one can hear her screaming in the black. No one saves her. When she woke from that, finally released, Stefan and Damon standing over here in welcoming relief … all she wanted was Klaus. It was the first moment that she really felt that feeling as just Elena, no Tatia involved at all, because he was safety and survival and comfort. Ironic, absurd, the monster in her dreams, the great hate of her life, the man that murdered her and made her life hell… But he would've known. He would've seen Katerina, Katherine, imposter, and he would've pulled her from the black. She knows that. Knows it in her bones, without Tatia, without love.<em>

_Safety, survival, comfort. Instinct screams out for him and she would've gone running if it hadn't been such a ridiculous reaction. If she hadn't been so sensible._

_Niklaus, Nik, Niko, beloved, mate. Monster, murderer, enemy. Love. Protect. Hate. Hurt._

_It's not fair. This dichotomy. It tears her apart._

_She just wants simplicity. Peace. She wants home. And that's him. A thousand years past, that's still him. He's home._

_Katherine, Stefan, Damon, Caroline, Jeremy, Bonnie, Matt. They keep her here. They tear her apart. But she owes them that. She can't escape them._

_And now she's back there, fixated on what was stolen from her, what could've been done in her body, how she was used. How they left her. And she's sick. She's hungry and alone and not able to trust herself. Bleeding, weak, dying. Going out of her mind._

_"__Niklaus," she whispers headily, breathlessly, head tilted, face crumpling at the sight of him as her hands coil anxiously up her chest. She's tugging at the sleeves of her sweater, tugging it over her fingers, scratching up her chest to her throat. Not clawing in, just rubbing raw. It's a thing she can't seem to stop. Like the madness._

_He takes her by the shoulders, catching her, stilling her from her frenzied erratic twirl as she stumbled and spun across the ghost town Whitmore campus in the dark, fog and sickly orange lamplight closing her in, playing tricks with her head, shadows dancing. He catches her and stills her, ducking at the knees, dipping the chin, making her look straight into his serious jade eyes. She pinches her lips, head shaking, then trails those shaky fingers down the bristle of his jaw. He says, "Elena, look at me. Think. You shouldn't be out here. You need to find the cure." But she knows he's not real and all she can do is stare at his face, every feature, every inch, memorizing the sight she sees in her dreams, seen for millennia._

_"__You're not real," she whispers raggedly._

_Paying her no heed, he pitilessly insists, "You'll die without it."_

_She knows he's right but she can't think. It doesn't feel important. She's insane._

_Body taken by Katherine, locked in the darkness, finally set free to find she's been infected. By that bitch, that selfish vain vindictive bitch, her last stinging kiss goodbye from this earth. Infected by the ripper virus. Hallucinating parents and daughters and lovers and betrayers. Klaus and Aaron are the two most prevalent ghosts that haunt her. She doesn't know why at first it's Aaron. Nik, she gets. She misses him and she won't admit it in her right mind to herself so he shows up in her unhinged moments. But Aaron? She doesn't get it. At first, she doesn't understand what he's trying to tell her. Then realization dawns and it sickens her._

_"__Are you dead?" she asks him, tears slipping down her paled face. "Did I kill you?"_

_And then she turns around and it's Niklaus again, holding her shoulders, watching her fall apart with intensity and empathy but no mercy. "Get it together, love."_

_"__I'm sorry I sent you away," she cries, fingers bunching in the fabric of his leather jacket. "I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't. I wish I'd fought. I wish it could be easy."_

_"__Elena, listen to me. We have it. I can help you. I can save you," he's saying, but she pulls back with a panicked frown, shaking her head, saying, "No, no, no, no." Because it's not his voice and then it's not his face because the illusion shatters and it's Damon holding onto her, chasing after her, ignoring her protests as he injects her with a syringe of sanity._

_Salvation._

_When he confesses it was him that killed Aaron, upset and egged on by Enzo when she rejected him, when Katherine rejected him wearing the mask of Elena's body, she cries and yells and snaps his neck. To calm herself down. To release the paroxysm. She sits down beside him somberly in the grass and nurses a drink in depression until he wakes._

_"__My friend. You killed my friend." She says it softly, empty of emotion now, too drained to bleed out anymore._

_He's pushing up onto an elbow, rubbing at his nape with a grimace, groaning irreverently, "Okay. I deserved that."_

_And she says, not even looking at him, completely impassive, utterly spent, "We're done."_

_"__Elena," he sobers, pushing towards her. "It was a mistake. I didn't mean—"_

_"__No more," she cuts off, voice soft, vacant and decided. "You killed my friend. I can't."_

* * *

><p>In the kitchen, devouring strawberries and cream, peanut butter and chocolate, refueling her stamina and indulging her taste buds, she's in his shirt that hangs to her thighs, nothing else yet, her hair rumpled and looking like sex. Smelling like it too.<p>

Of course this would be when Hayley comes in, foraging the fridge and cabinets irritably for something to eat, settling finally for some all but raw meat. Eyes the other woman tensely as she chews it.

"Does this bother you?" Elena asks, genuinely wanting to know. Feeling awkward with a dash of considerate concern. "You're not … hurt, or jealous, or territorial, are you?"

"Why would it?"

"You are the mother of his child. You were his lover. This is your space, female wise, and I'd get if you weren't happy about me being here, flaunting this."

The wolf girl stops. Sets down her fork. Blinks in slow surprise. Incredulity. "You're serious?" She's confused by the doppelgänger's sincerity. Doesn't know what her game is.

"No, honestly," she presses onward, seeing this, "because if you are any of those things and it really bothers you, I won't stay here. I don't want to upset you."

"You're for real. _Jesus_. They were right about you." At her expectant expression, just waiting, Hayley sighs, rolls her eyes, saying dully, "No. I'm not hurt, or jealous, or territorial." But Elena cocks a skeptical eyebrow. "Okay, so I might be a tad territorial. It's instinctive. It's no big deal." And she shrugs. Conversation complete.

Legs folded Indian style, sitting on top of the kitchen island, looking like the strange girl she really is, Elena smiles wide. Bites into a strawberry, juice sluicing from her lip. "Good. I'm glad." Then, "Because I think I can help you get your baby back."

The hybrid stiffens, eyes downcast, fingers furling tightly. "Hope isn't coming home. It's not safe here. It'll never be safe."

"That's not true. You'll see her soon. I know it."

Wryly, she drawls, "You psychic now too?"

"Just optimistic. We can take care of Esther, together, and you'll have control of the rest of the wolves once she's gone, and the ones that don't fall in line won't be welcome, and the vamps are all but decimated, and what little Marcel is beginning to build up across the river won't be a threat to your child."

"The witches—"

"Are only still powerful because of Esther. The Other Side is gone. There are no more of their ancestors to draw all that extra juice off of. The witches won't be a problem once Esther is taken out of the equation." Her grin is crooked and feral. "Which will be my pleasure."

"You're cocky."

"I'm realistic. Trust me. I've been doing this a long time."

"You're only twenty."

"Assumptions can be deceiving, remember." After a pause, studying the other brunette, considering whether to continue, she opts to. "Like you and Elijah."

"Excuse me?" Hayley counters, wheeling around on her heel to face Elena proper.

She's not dissuaded by the warning in her expression. "You care about him, don't you?"

"What's it to you?"

"I care about him too. That's _it_ to me."

"Elijah doesn't want a monster," she tells Elena, body language stilted, dismissive, even as she gives off subconscious pleas for help. "He wanted someone good."

"You think you're a monster?" the gypsy girl carefully asks.

Coldly, "I became a monster to save my daughter."

"Hmm," Elena hums, thinking it over. Hands falling to her knees. Head canted. Lips pursed. Only when Hayley whirls to walk out does she say, "He's distancing himself for your own good, you know." And when the wolf turns, "He likes doing that." Loadedly, knowingly, "If he thinks he's in the way of something."

Which gets her back up. Archly, she challenges, "What would he be in the way of?"

"Good question." She lets that sink in, but then distracts her with, "If you care about him like I do, you'll want to keep pushing at that wall."

And like she knew it would, that drives Hayley out of the room. Driven into torn solitude, seeking out space and silence to be conflicted where no one can see, safe to feel pain and want in the security of her own haven.

Klaus comes padding in like a graceful sated lion through the doorway behind her, barefoot, shirtless, pulling her legs unfolded to stand between them, tugging her to the edge of the island, pressing flush against her. Against her wet lips, he quips, "Meddling again, love?"

"Does it bother you?" she tests.

His grin is wicked and indulgent and proud and annoyed. "If it did, that wouldn't stop you." Then he changes topic. Lets her know, "Kol's come around. But better to stay out of his sight, lover. He's still sore with you for burning him alive."

"My pleasure," she assures. The last thing she wants is to come face to face with the vicious trickster she murdered. He'd tried to punish her plenty enough as a ghost. God knows how bad it would be now that he's got a flesh and blood body again. With witch powers.

Oblivious to her worries, Klaus sweeps his tongue into her mouth, sucking the lingering slice of strawberry out. He slides his hands down the bow of her back as she shivers, arching for him, and slowly lowers, cupping her ass, lifting her up off the countertop as all four of her limbs come naturally around him, latching loose but digging in. Kissing deeper.


	13. Part XII

_Another one bites the dust_…

When he calls for her in his sleep, he means it. When he says her name, he used to, and still mostly does, mean another's. From the first night, the first moment, pinned to the ground by his treacherous non father in the woods outside the Salvatore boarding house, watching a dead girl come back to life with a scream, and her first deliriously desperately whispered word was _Niko_, he said _Elena_ and thought _Tatia_. From that moment on, it was always, "Elena," with the echoing reverberation of _Tatia_ arced between them. The newest doppelgänger, overlooked thus far but for her immense utilitarian value, had become a pale reflection, a strongly more vibrant and sure psyche taking dominance, an all-encompassing presence superimposing itself over the youthful uncertainty of its heir, however impressive her old soul steel.

He looked at Elena, at the face of the only woman he's ever truly loved, and saw only Tatia. Elena was present, Elena was an obstacle, which he abided patiently, but Tatia was the woman he loved. The woman he claimed.

"_Elena_," he would say, and their eyes would meet, and the girl would hear what he'd meant. He never worried how it made her feel, never wasted a thought about minimizing the girl she'd been before his love resurrected, the girl a part of her still was. He just said, "Elena," and meant, "Tatia." He never considered Elena.

But tonight, half asleep, pulled up from the deep, when he calls out for her, driven awake by some primal instinct or intuition rather than any real noise or disturbance, he means as he says. "Elena?" And then, "_Elena_!" he growls, low and dangerous, slow and visceral, fingers bunching into fists against the sheets as he swings upright in bed.

The room is empty. Silence and stillness a glaring sign of something wrong because the patio doors are open and the curtains are rustling in the November breeze, the only movement to find, needle still spinning with tinny quiet around the vinyl she'd put on before he'd drowsed. In his shirt with the sleeves rolled up, golden brown hair wild and sexy spilled down her shoulders as he watched her bare toes twirl across the dark oak floor, arms winding overhead, eyes closed, head tipped back. Her toes were painted crimson, he remembers. Doesn't know why that's the thought that sticks in his brain, why it'd drawn his eye, the way the bronzed length of her leg had and the soft swell of her hip, her fingers dusting through the air as she danced.

It takes half a second, but that's a long fucking second, before he realizes what woke him. Why the stillness in the room felt so wrong. But once he realizes, he shakes off the fog and can recall the trigger that caused his duress.

"Where am I?" he'd demanded, finding himself in a strange room with no memory of how it was he came to be there or anything that came before. The air had a hazy green shimmer glazing over it in a way that made the whole place feel unreal. When he turned to see his brother's new vessel awaiting him, he knew why.

Finn had pulled his brother into a dream. Shared by Elena. She was unaware but he stepped aside and had shown him the girl curled on her side in a small cage, shadowed somewhere right ahead of him and yet apart from this surreal room entirely. Bars soaked in vervain searing the bare skin of her back as she trembled, hardly clad but for dirt and sweat and blood and misery, defeat was in every line of her abused body. As he saw her, Klaus went rigid. She looked broken. It was a sight straight from his darkest nightmares and it froze him. Gripped him.

There've been times, like when Kol burned, that he'd fantasized causing her pain and taking pleasure from the exquisiteness of her timeless lovely face twisted that way, but _this_ sight never stopped being a nightmare.

Witnessing the effect it has on him, Finn's smile was slow and victorious. Insidious. He sees it mirroring his own so common expression. "You had your fun picking me apart, little brother. Now it's time I have mine."

And his wolf snarled, _Mine_. The sudden surge of its overbearing presence, its vehemence, jarred the Original hybrid. That one word meaning everything. Harsh, volatile, gut-wrenching, darkly animal. Mine. It's more than a word. It's a universe. It's gravity. It's death. It's essential self. Klaus tried to stay calm, collected, never the one to show where his weaknesses lie. He tried to maintain his mocking smirking confidence, his deceptive disinterest, but the sudden lashing intensity takes over like the crush of a tidal wave and the storm is unstoppable.

The last time the wolf rose like this, Marcel's minions had him in chains. And he eviscerated a hundred of them before his animal was satisfied.

He tried to tighten the leash but the reaction was too much his own to win. It's in his bones, his nerve endings, his core, thrashing free of its human cage, cutting through the bullshit in an instant. Age old tangled epic hesitations and denial are swept aside. _Okay, I've let you lie and waste time, but now I'm done. No more prevaricating_, the animal inside made clear in that swift startling second. _This is mine_, it says. That instinct, that creature, that primitive inner half. This is original sin. This is primordial self, base instinct, unalterable condition. _Mate_, it means. (_She is mine_.) Suddenly he was so crystal clear where the line lay and what he'll fight for. (_Die for_.) Abruptly, there is no leash. Abruptly, there is no question.

It's the cage that causes such a visceral immediate reaction. Cages and chains. They make the wolf erupt.

"You were so convinced that I couldn't get to you," his brother told him. "You were wrong, Niklaus. Your Petrova whore promises that." And when the wolf lunged for his throat, still stood smugly between Klaus and Elena's cage, he was caught in the vice of invisible restraint, kinetic power wrapping his throat, jerking him up short, brother to brother, nose to nose. The witch bares his teeth in vindictive ugliness, swears lowly to the hybrid, "I will take her apart piece by cursed piece, I will commit every depraved crime you have ever gloried in against her, until she is begging to be put out of her misery, and there is nothing you can do to take back your toy, Nik. Not until she's too broken for even _you_ to enjoy."

And the beast roars. Presses forward so ferociously that the grip of magic holding him back shatters around him. He lurches straight through his brother's apparition, tearing the world he'd constructed asunder. Before he can reach the caged girl, dream dissolving beneath his advance. Fury surging forward and left abruptly bereft.

When he breaks loose of Finn's dream world, waking fogged, it's Elena he calls for.

In his bones, in his oldest subconscious belief, he has faith in knowing Tatia can take care of herself. She's a hurricane. She's a twister. She's titanium. The only time she's ever not survived, it's been her decision to lay down and die. Because she fucking felt like it. Because she had her reasons. Because she said so.

It's Elena that's always being killed, being hurt, being taken. It's Elena that's always losing. Elena always.

His panic is for Elena. Brutal gut-wrenching panic and visceral wild helplessness and fierce animalistic urgency and possessive anger. For Elena. Because—

(_Mine. You can't have her. You can't touch her. No one is going to take her away from me. I'll slaughter them all. I'll make the world bleed._)

Like Hope.

And nothing else matters.

* * *

><p><em>Graduation Day isn't all it's cracked up to be. Because her life is the supernatural suckage that it is, the day is riddled with vengeful ghost problems and plotting witches and to top it all off comes along a petty vindictive doppelgänger with seriously skewed delusions of reality just as Elena is thinking the storm has passed.<em>

_She's recovered her old self again, feeling things again, been reunited with not just Jeremy but Alaric too, and nothing could be better than that. She's graduated high school with all of her friends, those that've survived, and given the cure to Stefan in a moment that made her feel almost as good as holding her brother's hand once more, even if he refused her offer. Kol took his day out of purgatory and used it to try very persistently to kill her, but even that couldn't dampen her brighter outlook. It couldn't kill her newfound hope._

_Partly because Klaus returned from New Orleans in the nick of time to save her from a mob of angry dead witches, and even though he'd focused his attention mainly on Caroline, whether genuinely fond of the blonde or making a point to Elena or both, the way he'd looked at her that first moment, that first heartbeat, before he'd remembered the strained place they were at right now, with those amusedly mischievously sparkling eyes and that boyish smile, gave her such protracted relief._

_In this weird place they're at, they play pretend at being strangers. Never let their eyes linger too long on each other, never direct their words to the other unless immensely casually within the group, fallen into a strange tension of playing at mere acquaintances. The hollow superficiality of it makes her ache._

_Kol's death has murdered something between them, having driven them to a vast distance, and she was afraid, aside all of her own doubts and conflicts and reservations, that it was a distance they could never span. But that smile, that look, it quelled her fear._

_And now the whole day is ruined, destroyed by Katherine freaking Pierce in a way a dozen kill happy ghosts and even treacherous Silas couldn't manage._

_Cornered in the deserted high school hall by Katherine, as she crawls across the floor being battered and taunted, she cries out, "Nik!" She has no reason to think he's near, except for the thrum in her body, the primitive intuition that's been physically supernaturally aware of that man wherever he is in the world for a thousand years. It's not rational, not conscious, just an ageless instinct, a deep ingrained reflex to pain and fear and despair._

_He's with Caroline in the dark stadium outside, parting ways, saying one day she might be ready for him, and when that day comes he'll be there, but then he senses Elena's distress and it pulls him from his focus. Head canting, body angling, features clouding, he doesn't recognize right away what made him stir. He listens until he hears her. Calling out to him._

_"__What?" Caroline questions, stepping back, confused._

_But he's blurred into motion before she finishes._

_"__Nik!" she cries, a shout of reaction torn from her throat as the broken broom handle stabs into her shoulder blade, knocking her back facedown into the floor. She's trying to drag herself away but Katherine won't give her an inch, bloody and grim, arguing nastily over semantics. She's deluded, narcissistic, a royal bitch. Guess it's true what they say, you hate the strongest the ones you're tied closest to. The ones deep down subconsciously you want so bad to care for, wish you could like, but they just make it impossible._

_She kicks her in the stomach so hard Elena flips over onto her back with a grunt, her heel stomping down, piercing the flesh of her thigh. She spins the broom handle and jabs it deep in Elena's throat, making her lurch, making her gasp, choking on her own blood. But then she makes a fatal mistake. She gets down low, up close and personal, to strangle the life out of her mirror image herself, to jam her hand into her chest and squeeze her heart._

_"__Bye, bye, little girl," she sneers victoriously._

_Viciousness rises in Elena._

_Katherine's grip tightens._

_Out of nowhere, Klaus rips her off of her, his fingers banding her wrist to crunch it into splinters so she can't hold on as he takes her shoulder and wrenches her away, sailing down the hallway to crash so hard into the far wall of lockers through the open doorway at the end of the corridor that the metal caves in on impact and she crumples. With a dark expression, low growl rumbling in his chest, he starts to follow after._

_"__No, Nik, stop." Clutching her ravaged chest, her dizzy head, blood on her lips, she chokes, "It's over." Struggles over off her back to push painstakingly upright. She'd already smashed the cure into her predecessor's mouth a split second before he'd arrived. "It's over."_

_"__I'm tired of this wretched creature causing me problems," he bites back. "It's unfinished until I've torn her vapid heart out once and for all."_

_"__Please don't," she murmurs, panting for breath. Still in pain. "She's been cured."_

_And he wheels back around to gape down at her. That dangerous look about him. "What?" he says slowly, overly pronouncing in his surprise._

_Slightly defensive, she retorts, "I was about to die. I didn't know what else to do."_

_"__So you decide to waste the only source of the cure in the world on your nemesis rather than kill her properly? I highly doubt this is your innovative form of payback, which is the only excuse for such an act I would ever tolerate."_

_"__That was supposed to be me," she says softly, mostly to herself, seeing all her hope of being human evaporate. Her focus has slid to where Katherine lies limp, not up to arguing with him, gripped with deep pure desolation. Resignation._

_Taking her absentmindedly by the elbow as he helps her up, unsteady on her feet, Klaus says somberly, "I'm sorry, Elena."_

_Which makes her look at him. Really look at him. This is the first time they've been alone, spoken without vitriol at each other, since she regained her conscience. Mournful distracted attention leaving Katherine and the cure behind, she concentrates solely on Klaus. Softened by the unexpected softness in him. The graciousness. She turns their grasps to touch his arm, his grip still lingering on hers, her fingers wrapping his bicep. Sincerely, she tells him, "I'm sorry you won't have your hybrids."_

_"__We're even," is all he replies._

_That hope she'd felt when he'd looked at her for just a heartbeat out in the sunshine with a decapitated witch spewing blood all over the bleachers, it comes back full force, blooming big and stronger than ever, flushing through her to alleviate the despair of losing the cure. She had been ready to give it up for Stefan and feel satisfied, glad for him, because she knew that he deserved it more than she ever could. But to lose her chance at humanity for Katherine's sake is just too unfair to sit well._

_But the hope softens that blow. Eases her soul._

_With a tentative squeeze to his arm, she pulls gently away and limps carefully down the hall to crouch over her troubled doppelgänger. Biting into her wrist, she pries blood free and presses it to the other one's bloody mouth, letting it slip in with the cure and broken glass on her tongue to heal the broken bones and damaged skull and God knows what else._

_When she turns around, Klaus is gone. The hall is empty again. She's left alone to walk away by herself. It's disappointment churching in her, longing for things to be different or just for him to come back and accuse her some more, and she's full of regret, a thousand things of it and endless, but not entirely for Katherine._

_Maybe humanity will make her a better person._

* * *

><p>Elena awakens right where she passed out. Fifth time? Sixth? She slips in and out of weary bleary consciousness as they come and go from the ravaged room. It's some kind of old washout chamber in the derelict sanitarium on the edge of town. The pipes are rusted through but water still spits out when they make it, her blood sluicing across the grimy tile of the walls and floor to swirl down the dipped drainage at the center of the room. The scuzz and bars on the narrow box of a window at her back waters down the sun, dims the light, but she can hardly see through the grit and burn in her slightly swollen eyes.<p>

Hung by her bound wrists in chains bolted to the ceiling, toes scrabbling to touch ground for purchase and screaming for relief off the pressure on her disjointed shoulders. But she can't get a grasp, strung up just an inch or so too high, so the weight of her body bears down on her arms, pulled into stress positions, on her ruined joints as they try to knit themselves back together but can't manage it without being put back into their sockets. And food. She's not going to heal until she replenishes. The first thing they did when they get their hands on her was desiccate the girl. Magic and cruelty. Terrible combination.

She can't quite remember how she got here, but she's been hanging like this for days. Thinks, struggles to untangle the confusion, scrub away the black, knows she was dancing and happy, feels like she'd been watching Niko sleep, hoping to hold onto that peace. She'd gone out onto the terrace in the dark, hadn't she? Maybe? The fresh night air. The Quarter a mellow revelry below her. Had she been on the phone? Talking to … someone. Caroline? The line had gone dead and she'd turned around to have a hand crushed over her mouth, smothering her yell, agony like Bonnie's aneurism spell exploding inside her brain, making her knees buckle.

Fallen into a man's arms. Shoved into a car. Dragged carelessly across concrete and leaves. Shackled and levered upwards. Woke up like this. Been here ever since.

For awhile, she was alone.

Now he's back.

The white man she murdered once in a black man's body, tracing a knuckle down her broken cheekbone with an unkind smile, taunting her with his gentleness. That's what she wakes up to this time. Last time it was his mother.

"It's lovely to see you again, Elena," she said, meaning the exact opposite. "I had hoped we could continue our conducive relationship."

And so she spat blood in her face, because conducive doesn't count if it's coerced with spells of manipulation and stripped of freewill. Because this is the woman that took everything from her on more than one occasion. Absolutely everything. She's the source of every grief, every love, every sin. She spat into the witch's face and got magicked in retaliation, Esther's friendliness so quick twisting into something ugly, killer agony searing through her brain again, blood boiling in her veins as she tips her head skyward and screams.

For awhile, she was alone. For awhile, everything went black.

But she's awake again and Finn's spoiling for more. He talks about things she's not sure of, can't quite focus enough to absorb, doesn't bother trying. But his tone swings up and down with heat and viciousness, then coolness and niceties, warning her with every spike of it right before the pain intensifies. He's talking his mommy issues out on her. He's using her like an object that tethers him to the brother he hates so much, fueled by such longing, such insecurity, so much so alike to the rest of them, and just as unaware of it as they are. She finds it funny. Would laugh if she had the energy to expend. But she's saving up, spooling every dreg of it she can, coiling to do something to help herself.

With as many people in the world as there have been willing to rescue her, Elena's come to realize she can't count on being saved. Used to be, she wouldn't have to worry on it. These days, it scarcer comes along. She's gotta do it herself or die.

Finn is like Niklaus. Like Rebekah. Like Kol. Feeling unloved, unwanted, no attention ever enough to sate the scars, the gaping wounds, and their desperate desires to be accepted and part of the whole, not forgotten, not cast aside, not overlooked, makes them sadistic. Each and all. The only Mikaelson sibling to have escaped the curse of that trait is noble Elijah, which she is so grateful for. Like a cool splash of water kissing her skin as it runs down, beating back the searing angry fever eating at her.

Unlike Klaus and Rebekah, and even Kol, she has zero empathy for Finn. She doesn't care. Elena might, solely Elena, if that girl still existed, but who she is now has known him too long to feel pity, compassion, understanding. The ultimate betrayal is the only unforgivable thing and Finn is the embodiment of that. Finn is the brother who sold Niklaus out, who got him captured by the witches, who led Tatia to her death on a cursed altar for Nik's sake. She'll never forgive it. So she has no pity, no softness, and she has no regret for killing him the first time. Won't regret this time.

"_I'll send my regards to hell_," she gravelly croaks, fingers tightening around the chains that string her up. So quiet he misses her words.

"What was that?" he asks, leaning closer, a mean smile showing his teeth. Ready to be entertained by the Petrova whore's pleading and excuses. It doesn't occur to him she's a threat, even in this condition, and that's always their final mistake. The last thing he expects of her is to summon the dregs of adrenaline and sheer stubborn hatred to blitz the bastard.

Getting him close by exaggerating her weakness until he's completely lulled, submitting to torment like a frail defeated thing to encourage his preconceptions, how lowly he thinks of her. Manipulative whore, cursed face, maneuvering others into protecting her, bending to her will, playing the innocent ingénue, pretending at impressiveness when all she is, he thinks, is weak. Pathetic. _Worthless Helen of Troy_, he'd called her once. She replays these things in her head to galvanize her fire, her hate, her determination, digging down and pulling out the viciousness and ugliness and vengeance forged from heat and horror. Lashing out, headbutting the witch when he leans in, teeth bared, gritted hard, white-knuckling her bindings, hoisting herself higher with an agonizing jerk. As he rears back from the hit, stumbling off balance, her legs swing up with all that she has and her thighs cinch around his neck, calves slamming into his back, wrapping his shoulders as she twists her hips, her torso, turning the chain, flipping him to the ground with a sobbing scream for her shoulders as she snaps his vertebrae.

"_Jesus, Christ, God, fuck, please_," she whispers harshly through her teeth, face pressed into her burning arm, trying to control the pain.

Dammit, she should've pulled him in. She needs blood. She should've drained him. But she was too desperate to take him out, had one chance to do this, couldn't risk his vile black magic overpowering her. _If it's not a finishing move, don't bother_. Alaric's words echo in her mind and she can't help a wobbly smile at the reminder. God, there are people she misses. She'd grieved so hard for that man, that father figure, and she was so distracted by other things that she took for granted his unexpected return.

"I'll fix that," she murmurs to herself, struggling to rip the bolt from the ceiling keeping her hung this way. "I'll see him again and really savor it like I should have." Determination, resolve, clearing her vision, her wandering thoughts, cutting through the hazy excruciation.

She doesn't have the brute strength to yank the bracket out, so she starts swinging herself from one side of the room to the other, feet kicking off each wall, gaining momentum. Finally it comes loose, not all the way, but enough to catch her feet on the floor, taking purchase. She uses toes and ankles and knees to finagle the dead witch's arm up to her mouth, fangs latching in with a hiss of impatience, sucking fast. Furious. Blood coats her sandpaper throat and she sighs in ecstasy, relief, crying joy. She takes as much as she can stand and gives the chain a blunt tug, coming undone, clattering down like a heavy limp snake. She shatters the cuffs from around her bloody raw wrists and collapses onto the corpse, catching her breath as her body heals itself as much as it currently can manage.

For awhile, despite the risk of Esther returning, all she can do is lie there.

Remembering when the Travelers had her in a dungeon, bleeding her dry, every new visit of an impassive face bringing another emotionless slice of the knife into her flesh, no matter how much she begged and reasoned and lied and threatened. In her delirium that dark day, she had imagined Niklaus coming to save her. Felt it like it was real, remembers it like it truly happened, not a dream but a vivid hallucination. The shock and relief and happiness and love and safety at seeing him wrench the door off its hinges, feeling his calloused hands on her face as he lifted her head where it hung and his blue eyes scanned her features, studying her hurts. He'd crushed the chains to dust that tied her to the wall and caught her in his arms when she fell, carrying her out into the light, a sensation of such serenity overtaking her because she knew nothing could touch her while he was near. And then the crushing impact of reality broke her down as she realized it wasn't real. What was real was the darkness, the dankness, the rusted chains, the unforgiving wall at her back, the knife in her flesh.

No one was coming, she knew then. Because she'd ruined his love for her when she'd killed his little brother. Because she'd sent him away instead of fighting for him. And all she wanted in her moment of desperation, vulnerability, unguarded desire, was to see him again. To be saved by Niklaus. Elijah. Rebekah even.

They were gone now and the vestiges of her old life gone with them, leaving her lonely in the middle of a crowd of friendly faces, left behind of her own making.

When it was Stefan's face that swam into her bleary vision, breaking her chains, letting her lean on him as they staggered to freedom, in the aftertaste of the relief was a strange sense of hollow longing.

Now that she has no one to lean on, it makes her sick that she took him for granted as she drags herself out of the ruins of a turn of the century insane asylum. Waiting any moment for the wicked witch bitch to appear from behind a corner and send her back into a torturous hell. But the witch never shows and Elena staggers out into the sunlight, breaking from the heavy double doors of the front entrance, kicking up autumn leaves as they blow across the pavement. She makes it to the rotting iron gate at the edge of the property before her strength gives out and she can't make it any farther.

The madhouse looming high and ominous behind her, Elena grabs onto the iron with shaky paled fingers as she collapses, graceless and beaten. It might've just been a break, she might've been able to push ahead, keep going, despite it all, if the last thing she saw before slipping away hadn't been Elijah, Klaus, and Marcel rushing for her in the distance.

_Thank God_, she thinks, essential things unfurling welcomingly in her. _Safe, saved, home, protection, remedy._ She sees them like a mirage coming toward her and lets herself give up and fall in, swallowed by oblivion, because she knows she doesn't have to fight anymore.

* * *

><p><em>All this talk of finding the white oak stake, of killing Klaus, she can't let that happen and dreads the moment she's faced with that choice, faced with standing between him and Damon and Stefan and Bonnie and Tyler and Matt and Alaric and the ghost of Aunt Jenna. She keeps her mouth mostly shut, hoping it never comes to that, but she knows in the pit of her stomach, just knows, it will. But when they bring up a test run by going after the firstborn Mikaelson, she has absolutely no problem with that. At all.<em>

_Finn colluded with his mother to try to kill Niklaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol._

_Finn pretended to be on their side and then he lured Nik out of hiding and right into the hands of the witches that would kill her._

_She never did like Finn. She liked Sage, but she could never understand why she loved him. Except that she really didn't know him. Not as well as Tatia knew him._

_So when the group formulates the plan, she doesn't object. She agrees to be the lynchpin. She helps Matt shove the white oak stake right through his heart. Watches him burn up grimly, watches Sage break down in tears from afar, from the shadows, wishing she could've spared her the hurt. But she doesn't regret the murder of one itself._

_Not until she's face to face with a grieving bloodthirsty Klaus and he rips into her throat, grabbing her close, screaming gutturally through gritted teeth, asking her what she's done, asking her over and over, even though he already knows. Felt it when it happened in his heart, as he lost one of five, and the hurtful realization that Caroline was distracting him for exactly this purpose. And it's not his anger that hurts her, that makes her rethink her choice, and it's not the pain he causes, bruises digging into her arms where he holds her, crushes her, wet torn flesh of her neck where his fangs ravage, because she can take pain._

_It's how devastated he is beneath the fiery rage._

_There was a reason Finn remained trapped in his coffin for nine hundred years. Even after his horrendous betrayal, Niko could still not bring himself to kill his brother. His mother, yes, but not his brother. They were supposed to be always and forever, together against everything no matter what, and his breaking of that is something Klaus has never gotten over. But he did not want him to die._

_Tatia did._

_She thought it would feel good. Bloodthirsty and righteous, grim and murderous, God help her now, she thought it would be satisfying._

_Only now she knows how sick she feels, because Klaus rips into her throat, grabs her close, nearly kills her, and then he collapses to his knees after she slides weakly to the floor, his head in her lap as he weeps, her fingers stroking his hair. "I'm sorry," she says, crying soundlessly herself as he breaks. "I'm so sorry." And she bends over him, covering his crumpled body with her own, shielding him from the world._

_Knowing she can't take it back._

* * *

><p>The relieving touch of a cool damp cloth to her broken cheek as it mends itself wakes Elena. Slowly, softly, safely. She comes easily aware, not groggy, not panicked, not beleaguered in any little way. She's laid out in a familiar bed, in the bed she'd been stolen from however long ago, clean bloodless fingers reaching up to wrap gently around the hand tending carefully to her. Opening her eyes, she knows who it is before she sees him in the glow of the candlelight.<p>

"We could have been happy, you and I, if fate had altered. Tatia and Elijah. You would have made me very happy, you know that?" she tells him, a heartfelt thoughtful whisper gone rough by the rasp of her hoarsened voice, sharing old reflections she never got the chance to say aloud. He deserves to hear it. Whether he needs to or not anymore, she's unsure, but he deserves more. "I'm sorry I never made that clear."

"If Niklaus had not loved you," he replies, his tone like his face, ever neutral.

"Yes." She stops, licks her lips, turns into his ministrations with a furrowed brow. "If Niko had not loved me," she murmurs huskily, shutting her eyes again. "I wonder if things would have happened the way they had if it had been us. If your family would have felt so threatened by the wolves that they created immortals out of you." Then, quieter still, "If you would've chosen me over your family. Slaughtered your kin for my sake as Niklaus had." Her fingers curved around his hand squeeze once reflexively and her lips lift in a tired smile. "I don't think that you would. You are too good. They mean too much to you."

"Good?" he echoes, gravely wistful amusement in his faint smile. "No, Elena. I wear a well constructed civilized mask. Beneath it, I am just as much the savage my brother is."

"That's not true. Especially when it comes to family."

"You are family. You always were."

"The war could've gone so differently, couldn't it?"

"But Niklaus _did_ love you, so all those possibilities are irrelevant."

It's so true, there is nothing she can say to that. She firms her grip on him, stilling his strokes with a significant look complicating her dark mystic eyes when she raises them to meet his stare. Something about Elijah always makes her throat feel constricted. Makes her heart flutter oddly. Just shy of bated breath that she can't seem to prevent. She thinks it's an Elena thing, because it is something she remembers from the day they met, when he came in as the terrifying dignified mysterious big bad summoned by Rose to take the doppelgänger away somewhere. As he moved in a blur to stand before her, a little too close, and leaned in like he was after a kiss, dipping his nose below her jawline to take in her scent. Ever after that, as much as their dynamic evolved, much as their relationship changed, shifting with ever altering circumstances and their altered views of each other, she always reacted to him the same. But she can't remember feeling that way in her old life, as Tatia, however much she cared for him, admired him, felt attached to him. Her heart didn't quicken uneasily like this, something mystifying on her tongue, wanting to be freed somehow. Like when they stand in the same room together, eye to eye, there is something that should be said, done, understood, but neither of them can seem to conquer it.

She doesn't ask anything, but he knows what she's wondering when she breaks their gaze, attention skating mildly around the room. He knows her question, sees it in her eyes though she wouldn't voice it, and his fingers withdraw from her face. Tells her obliquely, "He's hunting."

Which could mean a million things. But she has a feeling.

* * *

><p>Do not go gentle<em>, the poem goes. <em>Do not go gentle into that good night._ And she can't tell whether it's Klaus or Esther or herself that makes her think of that now. Of all the times it may have been appropriate, all those times she was on the verge of death, or actually dead, now is not one of them. She thinks she may die in a minute or so, but the situation at this very second isn't all that life or death immediately._

_At the roaring twenties annual Decade Dance, Elena is in Stefan's arms, her chin resting on his shoulder, momentarily at peace, and Klaus is busy twirling Caroline to Tyler's annoyance, when their eyes lock across the colorful gymnasium. It's an instant vivid electric connection, bodies suddenly alighting, becoming intense as they wake up, amped by the other. As always. She remembers his cruel games that night he first returned to Mystic Falls with Stefan in tow, before her second death, before Tatia's merging. _There's my girl. You're supposed to be dead_. His grip bruising her arm as he jostled her along the hallway, the palpable freezing terror she and felt, the way he used her and Stefan against each other to torment them both. He was the big bad wolf, the monster that she'd been waiting for, the arm around her torso and the fangs in her neck when she died by the witch's flame on a cursed rock under a storming sky. He was Klaus the strongest scariest oldest vampire in the world. He wanted her blood. And her death. Their eyes meet, safe in Stefan's arms, the pretty line of Caroline's back beneath his splayed warm hand, so much having changed by now, so mind-blowingly much, and Elena feels the irony vividly as she craves him but can't admit it. Any of it._

_When Esther lures her outside, a perimeter spell trapping all the supernaturals within, Elena looks back to see Klaus slamming furiously against the invisible barrier beside Stefan and Damon, roaring at his mother through feral gritted teeth._

_The girl thinks of that poem then. Remembers praying from purgatory that Nik leave the poor sweet Dylan Thomas alone when his path crossed with the poet's, drunken and doomed, one night in New York._

_She isn't sure what causes the thought._

_Torn, Elena turns from the sight of her boys and follows the witch into the dark despite his vicious protests. She won't let anything happen to them if she can help it by going, whatever her fate._

* * *

><p>Fed and revitalized, every ache and break mended like it never existed, Elena comes down to seek out her wayward wolf.<p>

She finds him in a parlor off the open courtyard, passing between overgrown ivies across a rich belvedere and through the wide archway to where he waits. There's blood on his sweater but only a little and he stands straight and eerily still, hands clasped loosely behind his back, eyes on the wall of mounted monitors before him. Security feeds of the entire compound. One screen in particular is his focus. Marcel standing soberly over the corner of a settee where Kol sits, his new face still strange to her, the black man's arms folded and a mild glower tensing his features up, standing guard. Beside Kol is the blonde she remembers from their battle with Mikael, Camille, she's pretty sure. Pressed close against her side is a younger girl with luminous long honey hair and pouty lips, a gash down her apple cheek, banked fire in her glimmering eyes. It's the same little witch that distracted Mikael long enough for Elena to get the white oak stake out of Klaus's chest and kept its magic from being fatal while it was in there. That inclines her right off the bat to be welcoming of the teenager, her usual disdain for witches notwithstanding.

The way they all huddle grimly, serious faces and heavy tension crackling between them all, consternation and worried words volleying around, it's obvious something is happening.

Elena comes to stand beside him and observe together.

"Who's the little one?" she asks after a moment of silence.

"Davina," he answers, gaze flickering sidelong to her for a beat before refocusing. "The little quarrelsome witchling Marcel has de facto adopted."

"Ah," she sighs, smile teasing the edges of her mouth despite the gravity of her past week. Evidence erased from her flesh, proof of the ordeal still sits leaden in her gut, on her shoulders, blackening her soul until she can wash it away again. It always takes time. "I heard of Marcel's girl while we were fetching Finn, but I didn't connect the face."

"Pretty face for such a pain in the arse."

"You don't approve?" she jokes, eyebrows rising, arms folding, laughter in the tone of her voice if not an actual emergence. "She saved your life. I remember that much."

"Freak occurrence," he dismisses, a wave of his hand emphasizing his dislike. "All that little creature has ever been is trouble to me."

"Why?"

Klaus turns to regard her fully at this. "Why what, love?"

"Don't play dumb. Why is she a pain in your ass? What did you do to her?"

"Nothing," he defends, slightly affronted, but it only lasts a second under her unimpressed glance and then there's only reluctant sheepishness, looking away with a mild frown. "I may've had a hand in the death of her potential boyfriend or something or other."

"A hand in, Niklaus?" she chides, suddenly serious now.

"I pushed him off the gallery balcony of the church, love. But I gave her ample opportunity to spare his life and she insisted on doing things the hard way."

"That's no excuse!" she growls, gaze fixing on the screen with intensity now, studying the girl only a few years younger than Elena. The same age Elena was when Klaus first came into her life and sacrificed her on his altar of ruthlessness. "So her protecting you from the white oak stake was about Marcel, in spite of you, and did you even say thank you?"

"Of course not." She cocks a cold eyebrow and he huffs. "She never gave me the chance. I do not think you're in position to judge me my decisions, dear Elena, when you've no idea what the circumstances of the situation were."

"You're right. I don't." After an awkward pause, she admits, "And I have no high ground to judge you anyway … now that I have my fair share of innocent blood on my hands."

The way he looks at her then, peers into her very soul, a softness coming to him abruptly, something vulnerable spurred by the way it makes him feel, learning how she sees herself now, finding it unthinkable. She reads him so easily most times, and this is one of them, but she can't bother press on with the point, fighting to condemn herself in his eyes. There are things he has blamed her for, such as Kol, such as her denial of Tatia and her feelings for him, but one thing he will never accept is the coming down off that particular pedestal.

She's the goodness, the faith, the mother. He's the darkness, the doubt, the monster. She is and has always been to him, with solitary exception, a righteous creature.

"Did you find what you were looking for?" she questions at last, pointedly not facing him. "While you were hunting."

"Not quite," he answers stiffly, doing the same. They face forward, face the monitors, but the brush of their arms pressing tentatively together means everything. "Finn is dead. Unlike our treacherous mother, he had no master of the infernal body jumping she so loves to plague us by. He's well and truly gone. And this time," he confesses, speaking slowly, precisely for her sake, "I've not the capacity to grieve him as I did the first time you took his life."

"This time, I don't regret it," she tells him evenly, acknowledging what he'd been telling her. "I'm sorry if you thought I'd left you. I'm not sure how long I was gone—"

"Seventy-nine hours, thirteen minutes, and change," is his automatic retort.

Which makes her wince. Bite gingerly into her bottom lip. Eyes unwavering on the screen, the back of her hand eases sideways a few inches. Her knuckles brush his and her fingers unfurl, pressing backward, lacing into his own. Squeezing tightly. "I'm sorry."

"I knew where you'd gone," he says simply, doesn't offer to elaborate, and she can't bear to ask him how. "I won't interrogate you after your time away. All I'll ask … is if anything was done to you that you may have trouble moving past."

"No," she promises, without hesitation, without qualifier. Clears her throat, tightens her hold on his hand, says convincingly, "I'm fine."

"As am I," he whispers. Husky and rough.

Elena breathes a sigh of relief, having braced for more bad news, for a fight, for the so taxing emotional energy to navigate the minefield of his reactions, to reassure him away from whatever had happened while she was missing. What he might've thought and how that might've changed their situation here. Their precarious understanding.

After awhile, he angles openly for her, snakes his other arm the wide way around her body to coax the woman delicately into him. Making her grin. Secret sexy reluctant humor.

He starts to turn her into him, thinking this is a moment to close the gap, to try to reconnect and give in, but just before his lips reach hers, she rushes out with, "I have to go home." Just a bit breathlessly, hurriedly, before he can make her change her mind. "I promised Caroline I'd be there for Friendsgiving."

"Friendsgiving?" he asks, faint exasperation in his sigh as his arm drops away and he leans back out of her personal space, striking blue eyes cutting skyward.

"Thanksgiving is tomorrow, you know. None of us have families. Unlike you and yours here, we're all we have. I'm not going to bail on that. I can't."

"So go," he retorts, taking her aback by the swiftness of his capitulation, the typical brusque quality of his casualness chafing her, obviously unhappy. Defensive and withdrawn. The change is stark and startling, even though it's exactly his pattern. Any sign of backpedal or sidestep and he's the first to shut you out, cut you off, turn his back.

Not wanting to press her luck for the sake of the impulse to soothe him, she brushes uneasily by his stiff shoulder and scurries toward the exit, pausing only once she's over the threshold of the sprawling room, practically out the door. Looking back with an eventual, "We're not finished here with this, are we?"

He swivels around to face her in surprise, blinking slowly, head canted, gold curls ruffled, azure eyes studying past the surface, every facet. Klaus smiles. "Not even close, love."

"Good. I thought so." She doesn't say, _I'll be back then_. But they both know that she will.

Before she's gone, he stops her, whirling back around after he'd turned again, eyes squinted, lips pursed, finger to his mouth in consideration. "Ah, Elena?" Then, "Take Hayley with you."

Incredulous, Elena rotates. "Hayley? Back to Mystic Falls? Is that a good idea?"

"The farther I get you both away from this city right now, the less I have to keep in mind while handling my mother."

For a long tense moment, she remains quiet. Absorbing the very concept. "Fine. I'll be glad to have her, if she wants to come with me."

"She'll go," he informs her, his grin a scary thing to behold that only makes her laugh.

"She's not as obedient as you think."

The wicked grin widens with honest humor. A touch of fondness. "She's not obedient at all. But she'll go."

Elena laughs again, a throaty authentic thing, turning to go. Saying mildly, "Okay then."


End file.
